Preface: Scholarly Writing as a Spiritual and Reflexive Practice

Abstract

When Suresh started publishing research articles from Sri Lanka in the early 1990s, he was socialized into the scholarly conventions of the local academic community. In his autoethnographic book, Geopolitics of Academic Writing (Canagarajah, 2002), he has narrated how the local academic community functions. There the separation between the experts and the lay, academy and community, and the intellectual and the everyday is very thin. Both domains mesh and mediate all teaching and scholarly activities. Not surprisingly, values from ethics and spirituality from local intellectual traditions also influence their academic work. After all, Sri Lanka is the home of four great religions, i.e., Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.