Audit culture” has become a common – and extremely useful – rubric for capturing an ensemble of emergent ideologies, languages, documents, measures, and consequences within our academic worlds. I’ll be exploring the mutual entanglement of neoliberal styles in academic administration, new technologies of assessment, production, circulation, and search, ongoing practices of peer evaluation within highly hierarchical institutions, and the careers of both scholars and works of scholarship. At its heart the presentation will focus on questions of the translation of value: how is innovative and significant research recognized and sustained, and what dimensions of scholarship may get lost in new practices of translation?

Presented with support of the Department of Anthropology