Academic neo-colonialism in writing practices: geographic markers in three journals from Japan, Turkey and the US

Abstract

A global academic division of labor plagues contemporary academic production. The epistemological implications assign southern knowledge to the status of "data" for the use of northern "theory." The institutional consequences affect the training and promotion of scholars, and the distribution of academic resources. The persistence of global power relations in academic production is an indicator of the achievement of the West in establishing a Eurocentric relationship with the rest of the world. This paper looks at the manifestations of the contemporary academic division of labor in scholarly writing. We examine articles published in three international academic journals, based in Japan, Turkey, and the United States, and focus on the different ways in which authors use geographic markers, words that indicate that a title, an abstract, or a sentence is written in reference to a particular location a country, a city, or another geographic entity. Scholarship in the North relies on a writing style that reflects and reproduces its privileged position in the global academic division of labor. However, southern scholars tend to write in a style that makes heavy use of geographic markers, which reflects their underprivileged position in global academic world as "case" or "data" producers for northern theory.