Don't we already do this?

It's true that many of the principles highlighted in emergent scholarship—such as collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and public engagement—aren't entirely foreign to traditional academic systems. Many institutions and funders do encourage these practices, and excellent examples exist across disciplines.

However, there's an important distinction between these activities being encouraged as supplements versus being fundamental to how scholarship functions. In traditional scholarship, these elements often remain peripheral rather than central to the scholarly process.

Consider how traditional academic incentive structures operate in practice:

• While collaboration is encouraged, individual achievement (first authorship, h-index, citation counts) still dominates hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions
• Interdisciplinary work is praised but often harder to publish in prestigious discipline-specific journals that carry more weight in evaluation
• Public engagement is valued as "service" or "impact" but typically carries significantly less weight than peer-reviewed publications in so-called high-impact journals
• Methodological innovation is celebrated in theory but can face greater scrutiny in peer review than established approaches
• Open educational resources are commended but contribute little to promotion compared to traditional publications
• Community-based teaching initiatives often must be pursued alongside rather than as part of normal teaching workload
• Knowledge co-creation with non-academic partners rarely counts toward research productivity metrics
• Multimodal expressions of scholarship (videos, interactive media, visualisations) are often categorised as "outreach" rather than core scholarly outputs
• Long-term engagement with communities is difficult to sustain when funding and recognition systems prioritise discrete, time-limited projects
• Integration work that synthesises across disciplines often receives less recognition than specialised contributions within disciplines

The distinction lies not in whether these practices exist, but in how deeply they're embedded in academic systems and incentives. Traditional scholarship still maintains clear hierarchies, gatekeeping mechanisms, and validation processes that function independent of broader engagement.

Emergent scholarship isn't about introducing entirely new concepts—it's about repositioning existing elements to create a fundamentally different approach where connection, openness, and engagement become the primary mechanisms through which knowledge advances, rather than optional additions to an otherwise independent process.