Revealing the "ugly feelings" of rejection in academic publishing

While writing for publishing has been promoted as an effective doctoral pedagogy, it might unfortunately introduce doctoral students to the neoliberalized side of academia where scholarly legitimacy is defined in relation to one's publication record. Even worse, it creates a neoliberal fantasy that seems to be "fair-play" but is in fact infused with geopolitical and epistemological conflicts in global knowledge-making. Against these backdrops, this thesis aims to explore the affective dimension of academic publishing and, in particular, focuses on the experiences of rejection among Chinese English as an Additional Language (EAL) doctoral students in their participation in academic publishing. It employs an integrated theoretical approach combing poststructural feminism, affect, and Critical Race Theory, which reveals the politics of feelings and global hierarchies in knowledge consumption, production, and dissemination. This research involves five participants who were international EAL students enrolled into different doctoral programs at a Canadian university. With data collected from individual interviews, retrospective reflection, and informal conversations, I use nexus analysis to map the discourses, interaction orders, and historicity circulating the participants' rejection experiences. This research reveals three major lines of neoliberal discourses in academic publishing: metricization of achievement, economization, and entrepreneurship, showing how these seemingly universal evaluative logics can become power-laden in effect by reinforcing unequal relations of recognition and authority in global knowledge production. The findings also demonstrate the multiple instantiations of rejection concerning, for example, constant desk rejection of submissions, epistemological rejection, and non-publishing. Based on the experiences of rejection in academic publishing among the five Chinese EAL students, this thesis offers the theorization of rejection as an affect at the intersection of feelings, discourses, and subjectivities. It also presents how rejection could constitute a racial project that solidifies Global South researchers' becoming, acting, and feelings.