A couple of years ago I organised a roundtable paper as the concluding article of a Special Section of an academic journal and I’m now co-organising another one. I had a really interesting discussion with my co-organisers yesterday about what we thought we were doing and why, and have undertaken to write a paragraph overviewing what we mean by ’roundtable’ for ours. I have done a little bit of lit reviewing but not immediately found anything offering a taxonomy or model of types of written academic roundtable, so thought I would try to think about it here. This is extremely thinking-in-progress, so largely in the form of questions, and contributions are very welcome. Please do especially let me know if you do know literature on this – it surely must already exist? Almost everything does…
Not actually the original Arthurian roundtable: (cc) Leo Reynolds
I am interested in the written form of multi-author academic publications that call themselves ’roundtables’, rather than live discussions at a conference or seminar. In my field, ‘roundtable’ is the term most commonly used for this kind of paper but I think you also get ‘panel’ papers, which sound similar.
Some of the questions I am mulling over are: What is the status of a roundtable paper? What are the epistemic claims that are being made in publishing it? Are there limits to the potential for rigor, significance and originality (or other such academic criteria) in a roundtable paper? Why do we choose this form over other types of paper such as empirical papers, literature reviews and theoretical papers? Why are journals and book editors prepared to publish them and why do readers read them? What contribution do roundtable papers make to the debates and issues to which they speak? What are the affordances of a roundtable paper (or chapter)?
The metaphor implies something non-hierarchical, that the authors are all together discussing something as equals. There is no head of the table (really? Wasn’t King Arthur still really the head, and didn’t Merlin have more power than the Knights even though he didn’t have a seat? Is the journal editor Merlin?!). Maybe this claimed-but-maybe-not-entirely-true egalitarian nature also holds true for the modern academic roundtable. The ones I read often involve a couple of famous academic names and then some less well-known authors. I associate roundtables particularly with Judith Butler, which may just be about what I happen to notice, or does Butler especially like them? Or are roundtable papers a thing that academic superstars end up doing because everyone wants a piece of their thinking and this takes them less time than writing a traditional paper? Does contributing to a roundtable paper become that extremely hierarchical academic concept an ‘esteem marker’?
Or (and?) is it a way of doing academic publication more inclusively? I think I have seen roundtable papers where the contributors are a mixture of academics and activists or practitioners. Enabling non-academics with other forms of expertise to speak from a position of authority on a topic (rather than just ‘having their voices heard’ as research participants) could be one of the affordances of doing a roundtable paper, although co-authoring a traditional paper with activists/practitioners also achieves this.
I guess I have a kind of ethnomethodological curiosity about how academics are producing the social order that is a roundtable paper. Some of this could be answered by thinking about how roundtable papers look different from other academic publications. Without doing a proper discourse analysis, I’d posit that there are many fewer citations and much less careful warranting of claims, the overall structure is different (often responses to questions or provocations), and sentence structure is also more informal, there’s more use of personal anecdote and the first person. Surely some discourse analyst must have looked at this properly?
I think you only produce a roundtable paper from people who are part of a discourse community or a community of practice (or analogous concept). I think it’s always co-authored and the contributions are not theorised to be data, not least because otherwise we’d have to go through Ethics and get consent if they were.
Do roundtable papers always get reviewed? Do they get reviewed as rigorously as other papers or in a more light-touch way? My feeling is that it would be very hard to write the kind of roundtable paper that would be seen as very important in the neo-liberal university (4* in UK REF terms), however much it influenced people. Is contributing to a roundtable a momentary relief from the corsetry of producing the kinds of papers that tend to be valued more highly in modern academia? (Yes, yes, I know corsets weren’t actually uncomfortable for most of history but it’s too good a metaphor to forgo).
The uncomfortable type of corset c. 1880
Was there a spoken-word version before the written version? That’s my understanding of the origins of roundtable papers – typically there was a formal roundtable panel at a conference or seminar which then led to the written version, either based on a recording or not. Nowadays, that panel might be online rather than in the same physical place. But I know some roundtable papers start with the written word, not the spoken word. Starting with the written word might be more inclusive of academics who aren’t native speakers of the language in which the journal is produced and so might find writing easier than speaking it in a weird pseudo-conversational style.
I think there have to be at least three contributors, otherwise it’s a dialogue or conversation, typically with a Famous Academic. Could there be more than about ten contributors or would that become a board meeting or a banquet?
(‘For Victor Hugo’ sounds more like a Festschrift)
ETA: Aha, I have found something useful: https://www.academia.edu/17910274/Viability_of_Habermas_s_Discourse_Theory_A_Case_Study_of_the_Roundtable_Discussion_of_Derrida_s_Unesco_Lecture although this is about the kind of roundtable that was originally a spoken interaction, which I’m beginning to realise has some quite different discursive features than one that started as written text.
Remembering My Hat 
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