To Be of Use: The Work of Reviewing

The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. (Marge Piercy, 1973) Fleshing out remarks first delivered at an invited session at the 1997 meeting of the American Educational Research Association, I speak to the work of re-viewing from the perspective of poststructuralist feminist research. In a nutshell, this involves a focus on how practices often viewed as neutral in effect police, produce, and constitute a field.1 Both within and against tradition-bound disci-