The Violence of Literature Review

This event is part of the School of Education's . These seminars are free and open to the public.

Host: Language, Literacies and Education Network (LLEN)

Speaker: Professor Ruanni Tupas (UCL Institute of Education)

Literature review is often treated as a neutral scholarly practice for mapping a field and identifying gaps. In this talk/dialogue, we examine how literature reviews reproduce privileged knowledge, shape the questions researchers ask, and marginalise other ways of knowing.

Academic conventions organise existing knowledge, but they also help determine what can be known, whose knowledge becomes visible, and which questions become thinkable. Our article, ‘The Violence of Literature Review and the Imperative to Ask New Questions’ (Tupas & Tarrayo, 2024), serves as an entry point for a conversation about the politics of knowledge production, the power embedded in scholarly practices, and the possibilities that emerge when we begin to ask different questions. 

Bio: 

Ruanni Tupas is Professor of Language, Politics and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, where he is also Programme Leader of the MA TESOL In-Service. His research interests include Unequal Englishes, inequalities of multilingualism, and the politics of knowledge production.