Abstract

In this talk, I reflect on my experience – as a writer and as an editor of an Important Academic Journal – on bending the dominant writing style to express the particularities of one’s voice and urban experience. Can we realize critical urban studies’ vociferous ambition to expand geographies of theory-making, if we implicitly expect everyone to write in the same standardized format of Anglo-American research article? To which extent does the form determine the scope of what can be expressed? I argue that we should not only ‘include’ broader range of voices into our notions of excellence, but also actively create new models of excellence out of our diversity. While English, despite its colonial heritage, remains precious as our only real ‘Esperanto,’ we need to work together – native and non-native writers – to broaden the range of legitimate authorial styles so that it matches the real diversity of our thinking. However, to be able to do it we need to skilfully navigate the expectations of the neoliberal academia, bending the rules just enough to change them.