A core area of my research concerns scholarly publishing. Here, I examine authorship and publishing as cultural and institutional practices—practices that do not merely transmit knowledge but actively shape what knowledge is, who is authorized to produce it, and how it becomes visible. I study the symbolic forms, normative logics, and evaluative regimes that structure academic authorship, with a focus on the humanities and increasingly also the sciences.

Drawing on cultural sociology, resonance theory, and critical social theory, I investigate how scholarly practices are governed by broader cultural narratives and institutional rationalities—and how these practices, in turn, reflect, resist, or reproduce systems of power.
The Cultural Logic of Authorship and Evaluation
- What does authorship mean within institutional rationalities?
- How do scholars internalize evaluation logics?
- How do publishing practices reflect cultural anxieties?
At the core of my work is a sustained inquiry into the cultural logic of authorship and evaluation. Here, I focus on how scholars come to internalize the imperative to publish as a condition of recognition and survival. In both the UK and Germany, I have shown how “formal authorship”—that is, publication marked by institutional readability (peer review, brand name journals, countable formats)—functions as a symbolic substitute for scholarly value.
My book Authorship and Publishing in the Humanities (Cambridge University Press, 2023), based on my PhD at UCL, provides the empirical foundation for this analysis. Through survey data and qualitative interviews, I trace how institutional frameworks like the REF and the Exzellenzinitiative reshape the everyday logic of scholarly practice, compelling even critical thinkers to perform compliance.
This logic becomes particularly visible in my article Formal Authorship in the Wake of Uncertain Futures (OUP, 2024), where I argue that the mandate to “publish or perish” has become a cultural narrative that disciplines intellectual life. Scholars publish not only to communicate ideas, but to exist institutionally—to be seen, counted, and retained. I continue this line of analysis in The Meanings of a Publication in the Humanities (forthcoming), in which I propose a typology of publication’s layered meanings: as intellectual contribution, interpretive tool, bureaucratic marker, and public object. These meanings are not equally valued, and this inequality tells us something fundamental about what is rewarded, and what is lost, in contemporary academic culture.

Openness, Power, and Epistemic Injustice
- Who benefits from current open access models?
- How does openness intersect with global hierarchies and institutional power?
- What would a truly participatory and pluralistic openness look like in the humanities?
A second strand of my work critically examines the politics of openness and epistemic injustice. Much of the discourse surrounding open access assumes that removing paywalls equals democratizing knowledge. I challenge this assumption. In The Democratisation Myth (2021), I show how dominant OA models in the Global North continue to reproduce epistemic inequalities by privileging access to consumption over access to participation. Drawing on the framework of epistemic injustice, I argue that scholarly infrastructures often reinforce testimonial, hermeneutical, and objectifying exclusions.
In Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities? (2019), I advocate for a discursive and infrastructural reorientation of what is known as the open science discourse and movement. Rather than attempting to retrofit humanities scholarship into the epistemic molds of science, we should articulate an Open Humanities—a space of pluralism, contextuality, and interpretive depth. This article has since become a reference point in broader debates around reforming scholarly communication beyond the technocratic ideals of open science.
Infrastructures and Labor of Scholarly Production
- Who actually writes in science—and who is credited?
- How are publishing infrastructures designed, and what assumptions do they carry?
- What labor remains unrecognized in scholarly production?
The third area of my research turns toward the infrastructures and labor of scholarly production, particularly in the sciences. In Science in Formation (2025), I explore how metrics, metadata, and indexing have reshaped the very idea of scientific information. Scientists must now make themselves legible not through content but through algorithmic visibility. Authorship becomes detached from intellectual responsibility; it serves as a placeholder in a citation economy governed by bureaucratic abstraction.
This dynamic is further analyzed in Writing in the Sciences (2025), where I investigate the division of writing labor in contemporary science. Based on interviews with scientists and professional writers in Germany and the UK, I show how writing is outsourced, fragmented, and strategically managed. Scientific writers often carry out the textual labor, but remain invisible in authorship hierarchies—revealing deep tensions between epistemic labor and institutional recognition.

A Cultural Sociology of Scholarly Publishing
Across all of these areas, my research seeks to make visible the hidden rationalities of scholarly discourse. I ask how cultural meaning is embedded in institutional form, and how scholars navigate, resist, or internalize these forms. Publishing is never just the output of intellectual work; it is a medium through which academic life is governed, stratified, and symbolically performed. My work contributes to a growing critique of academic capitalism by exposing how publishing shapes not only careers, but our very conceptions of knowledge, authorship, and intellectual legitimacy.