Airing Grievances: Academic Hoaxing and the Performance of Boundary Work

Abstract

Through an examination of the 2018 “grievance studies” hoax this essay considers the role hoaxing plays in the articulation of both internal and external modes of institutional critique that pertain to the production, verification, and dissemination of knowledge. By examining the grievances of three academics who wrote twenty false/fraudulent articles—seven of which were published in (and later retracted from) peer-reviewed journals—this research attends to the different kinds of boundary work and repair that are performed and enacted by academics to shed light on the conflicting ways knowledge production and academic labour are currently contextualized and understood.

Keywords

• hoaxing
• academia
• boundary work
• peer review
• media discourse
• grievance studies
• scholarly communication
• publishing