Uses and Abuses of Gatekeeping: A Call for Affect, Ethics, and Rigor

Abstract: While the absence of gatekeeping can foster a problematic populist disregard for scholarly expertise, there can exist a tension between scholarship that seeks to challenge or reimagine ways of knowing within a discipline and gatekeepers reliant on pervasive epistemologies. Given the limitations of present philosophical gatekeeping practices, I propose three questions with which philosophers, including both authors and reviewers, might engage. First, what affects might this work incite within and among readers? By reconsidering the longstanding inattention to feeling in philosophical inquiry, emphasizing affect facilitates the inclusion of personal narratives, poetry, and other artistic endeavours. Second, writers and reviewers might consider: What is the ethical nature of this work, and how does it contribute to ethical debates within the discipline? Understanding ethics as inseparable from ontological and epistemological questions avoids situations in which conservative ethics are misrecognized as neutral. Third, philosophers might ask: When is this work rigorous? Rigor involves the evolving interplay of parts and whole within a piece. Asking when a work is rigorous starts from the assumption that deep engagement with most philosophical writing reveals moments of rigor worthy of further nurture and development. Gatekeepers might become hospitable guides who journey with authors through fluid gateways.