Short and Sweet

There’s been a bit of discussion this week on Bluesky about academic book chapters; the fact that they are often disparaged (especially in relation to the REF, especially by disciplines where the only ‘serious’ venue for research is the peer-reviewed journal article with metrics), the fact that they can actually be ground-breaking and influential. I’m firmly in the latter camp, not least because so many of the most important influences on my PhD research were chapters in collections (the one that instantly comes to mind is Abrams & Wrigley, Towns in Societies, but I could list plenty of others), but also because many of the things that I’m most proud of having written were contributions to such books. There was a thread asking people to suggest their own chapters that they felt should be read more widely, and my problem was deciding which of many possibilities to put forward. I once imagined that I would become the sort of eminent academic who would be asked to put together a volume…