Through the looking glass: publishing in peer reviewed academic journals

This paper considers some of the issues of power embedded in publishing in academic journals. It asks questions about the way in which individual scholars and researchers might be empowered within a hierarchical system in which getting funding and getting published are closely allied. Four concepts borrowed from diverse sources (creative power, the power to disbelieve, power as freedom and decisive preference) act as running stitches through an auto/biographical account of my return to the academy after an absence of several years. Showing how I exercised power as a PhD student I conclude on a polemical but somewhat speculative note as a scholar who has yet to find a home.