“Originality” is a small word carrying an enormous amount of weight in academic writing, and I think it causes a lot of undue angst.
We’re told our dissertations need it, our articles need it, our books need it, and somewhere along the way that reasonable expectation curdles into something much heavier, the sense that we need to produce an idea that has never existed in anyone’s mind before ours.
In this episode, I want to push back on that definition and offer something I find far more workable.
Scholarly originality is more often achieved by building on existing ideas that emerge through relationships, applying a familiar theory to an unfamiliar archive, or noticing and bringing to the forefront a pattern that everyone else has ignored.
A topic no one has studied is not the same thing as a contribution, and a well-trodden topic can still hold real insight if you’re asking a sharper question or reframing the stakes.
Give the episode a listen, and see whether relation, rather than invention, gives you a little more room in your quest for originality.
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