Becoming an “Activist Manifesto”: Autoethnographic Reflections on Epistemic Violence in Academic Peer Review

Abstract

This paper examines academic peer review as a site of epistemic violence, focusing on how feminist and decolonial scholarship in management and organization studies is disciplined, contained, and rendered conditionally intelligible. Drawing on feminist autoethnography, the paper analyzes the author's lived experiences navigating academic peer‐review processes across multiple top‐tier journals. It conceptualizes epistemic containment as the linguistic, affective, and institutional mechanisms through which critique is depoliticized, softened, or translated into dominant academic idioms and refusal as the situated often subtle practices through which scholars resist such pressures. The analysis unfolds across three dimensions: the grammar of containment, where reviewer feedback enforces norms of neutrality and objectivity; the affective life of containment, which reveals the emotional labor and epistemic exhaustion produced by repeated encounters with disciplinary regulation; and acts of refusal, where writing, citation, and tone become sites of resistance and reclamation. Situated within feminist epistemology, decolonial theory, and critiques of the coloniality of knowledge, the paper argues that academic peer review operates as an apparatus that reproduces global epistemic hierarchies. By foregrounding lived experience as an analytic method, the study contributes a containment–refusal feminist praxis that rethinks rigor, inclusion, and scholarly voice. It ultimately calls for a politics of writing, reviewing, and publishing otherwise; one that values situated knowledge, embraces affect as an epistemic resource, and fosters more plural, accountable, and decolonial forms of academic practice.