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December 13, 2005
VG pushes the traditional limits of the academy in several ways: it participates in the project of expanding the literary canon, it privileges the Internet as a site of scholarly production, and it is committed to publishing the work of undergraduate scholars. However, it strikes me that VG’s project is beset by tensions deriving from its location at the edge of the academy. VG exists in a precarious position: it wants to be revolutionary, to challenge traditional canon-formation processes and assumptions, to champion the work of under-represented women writers and artists, to encourage alternative pedagogies. But it lives within the academy, and derives the conditions of its existence (once and future funding, equipment, staffing [although currently unpaid, this is recruited from the ready pool of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in the subject matter], and, perhaps most importantly, authority) from that location. It is therefore understandably – if not necessarily – constrained to some degree by academic culture. And the academy, as we are all aware, is a bounded space, its borders maintained by admissions standards and policies, hiring and tenure procedures, publishers’ peer-review practices, and many other structures which require the supplicant to present evidence of his or her worthiness to gain entrance. In other words, the academy is a space protected by a variety of gatekeepers.
This is hardly a new concept, and there is a body of literature devoted to exploring its ramifications for our work as educators. To the extent that VG is a pedagogical project, a resource for teaching, it participates, at least potentially, in the teacher’s negotiation of her role as gatekeeper – if we regard good grades as a "benefit", the teacher decides who gets access to them. But to the extent that VG is also a publishing project, and a research resource, it partakes in another kind of gatekeeping: that of the editorial board, deciding who gets published. This has a double aspect in VG’s case: the board decides not only which students/scholars get their articles published on the site, but which writers and artists "merit" having their work represented – this last decision made according to sets of criteria that are in themselves problematic, and yet necessary, as addressed in Lauren’s discussion of VG as administrative assistant. Thus, the democratizing impulse that is at the core of the VG project – and that, left unchecked, might lead us to throw the site wide open, following the Wikipedia model and allowing people to post at will – must constantly be in negotiation with the more restrictive, policing functions described above.
Mamadi Corra and David Willer’s comment – “Gatekeepers control access to ‘benefits’ valued by others who are their ‘clients.’… [T]hat access is granted, not to something owned by the gatekeeper, but to benefits external to both the gatekeeper and the client-gatekeeper relation.” [1] – is worth pondering here, as it reverses the terms of the alliance I have posited above, in which the gatekeeper’s primary function is to serve the bounded space (the academy) by keeping the unworthy out. In Corra and Willer’s construction, the gatekeeper’s relationship is with the supplicant, “the client” who wants to gain entry. It is perhaps in this light that we might regard VG’s commitment to dialogue with its various publics, people who often challenge the decisions we make, the criteria we establish and uphold, in our role as gatekeeper. While our position within and allegiances to the academy cannot be denied, our political commitments and the demands for interactivity and responsiveness that proceed from the very nature of Internet communication urge us towards a constant critique and renegotiation of the gatekeeper function.
[1] Mamadi Corra and David Willer, “The Gatekeeper,” Sociological Theory 20:2 (July 2002): 180.
Posted by RachelMordecai at December 13, 2005 05:43 PM
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Comments
I think vg project is very important in our life. There are many benefits with it.
Posted by: elizakrzd2dnyp ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](/vg/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 29, 2008 06:22 AM
