Codeswitching, Academic Publishing, and A Complicated Debate on Research Accessibility

Hannah Spadafora
14 min readMay 31, 2021

There is an intense debate within the academy as to whether professional scholars should make their work more accessible to public audiences — a realization that all the knowledge in the world doesn’t bring change if researchers only talk to each other. Fitting the theme of the argument that academic writing needs to be broken down and made more accessible for popular audiences, this multiple perspectives debate feature is presented here with an additional follow up after each viewpoint ‘code-switched’ into down to earth, profanity-filled, acronym-using recounts of the same arguments. With a fair warning for the cursing here: Drunk History, I challenge you, and raise you a count of profane practical philosophy.

A. Knowledge generated in university halls is not always successfully disseminated in public discourse. When discussions are present, they are often diluted by non-academics, and sometimes skewered by such. Academic articles featured in graduate school classrooms, research journals, and professor conferences, however, can be obscure, opaque, and unreadable. Interpreting journal articles thus can be an arduous task; the jargon utilized renders it inaccessible to popular audiences, significantly decreasing the statistical probability of successful information transmission. Similar to…

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Hannah Spadafora
Hannah Spadafora

Written by Hannah Spadafora

Hannah Spadafora is a writer living in the Atlanta area with borrowed cats and underused degrees in anthropology, philosophy, and religious studies.