privilege as a meme

would follow

'HOOS' experience is it anyway

i've tried to argue this in academic settings, to little success against those who thing professors should be writing daily blogs, etc.

― ryan, Tuesday, June 2, 2015 12:03 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

send them this http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2014/08/academic-virtues.html

i think professors should be writing daily blogs. or at least, i'm very grateful for those who do that i read

oh my gosh i love that -- xpost

i think a lot of people in what i might broadly consider my "field" similar don't seem to grasp what makes academic writing different from other forms of writing. or rather what the unique virtues of academia are and what sort of thinking, research, and writing they permit that journalism and other forms of writing do not. so they end up writing a lot of glorified think-piece stuff dressed up with "academic" language, i.e. big words and obfuscatory rhetoric. they don't do the kind of long-haul research and analysis that the academic setting allows--indeed they often don't even see the virtues of it.

that said, i think there's something valuable in academics who /have/ a deep background on a subject weighing in on some "current" issue by means of a blog post, an editorial or whathaveyou. but its precisely their immersion in a subject through the kind of research/study that academia permits that lends their perspective value. not simply the armature of some easy-to-grasp cultural-studies "theory" through which which any given text (the blockbuster du jour, for example) might be ground.

that said, if you are the sort of person who has a hard time finishing a piece of writing, and you would like to get a job in the academy, you should absolutely concentrate on writing stuff for peer-reviewed journals rather than expending your energies writing a blog. i admit that many find that the daily practice of writing for a blog makes it /easier/ for them to put together longer pieces for journals. but that's not true of everybody.

i love that post so much. i have posted it here many times.

his day job afaict is to teaches academics to write well

but he thinks about bigger 'what is knowledge/the product of the academy' stuff in a way that is v appealing to me

"Too many academics today think of themselves as public intellectuals whose job it is to "spread ideas" through the most efficient media available to them. Such academics are, literally, ideologues; they think universities produce and distribute ideas."

👏👏👏

that's (ironically?) a good blog spot, caek!

part of my pov on this is that i am a big fan of big ambitious long-in-the-making intellectual books that only the academy seems to reliably produce, though not as much anymore.

spot = post, obv

while there's certainly room for a corrective to overeagerness to popularization of academic research there are many problems with this article

(1) the ideas are going to get spread whether academics themselves do it or not. is it better to have the author themselves write a blog-post, or a journalist? the choice isn't between spreading ideas or not, but being spread by experts or amateurs. take a site like Vox.com. they basically just skim abstracts of economics & poli-sci papers and turn them into articles, and do it on a massive scale at internet-attention-span frequencies. academics can't stop journalists from disseminating their ideas (although i wonder: does this author think it would be a good thing if we could?) so unless they are doing a perfect job of it (they are not), why not step in?

(2) this

In my speech from the floor, I had suggested that our admiration for people like Malcolm Gladwell (with whom many of the members of the panel were of course impressed) shows we are now trying to get people believe things they can't possibly understand. We are telling them what we think the truth is but without allowing them to engage critically with it.

is totally backwards! of COURSE people believe things academics tell them they can't possibly understand. that's a GOOD thing. and it has always been so. people study engineering so that when i drive over a bridge i trust it won't collapse. i don't have to critically examine the inner-workings of my remote to know it will turn on the television. the trust comes from knowing that these ideas were produced by a community with institutions (peer-review, replication, etc) that incentivize the scientific ethic. it's a brilliant solution to a principal-agent problem! if popularization were coming at the cost of scientific rigidity that would be a problem, but as i see it there is no significant trade-off?

of course not every academic is a scientist (and i know academics on ilx skew to critical theory humanities which has a complicated relationship to its own usefulness so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but i think as the perception of the rigour of the discipline decreases (from, say, physics to political science), so too does (a) people's inherent skepticism (that's one thing that annoys me about this argument: it assumes only people currently within academia will approach things critically--totally condescending and untrue!) and (b) the number of counter-blog pieces written by other academics criticizing it. but for (b) to work we need lots of academics to join the public discourse!

(3) i work in a relatively technical/jargony field that produces unreadable academic articles and yet this

there was a time when everyone understood that our knowledge was not the sort of thing that could be disseminated by op-ed or blogpost but required the long term mutual commitment of students and teachers in the classroom to be properly understood.

rings totally false to me. we would be a much stupider and poorer society if knowledge required long term mutual commitment to be understood. of course, it takes a lot of work and mutual commitment to produce knowledge. a social scientist should deeply understand the properties and assumptions required of all statistical estimators used, should have a thorough understanding of their data, etc. but the end result should be something people can understand in relatively little time. i think that's a depressing thought to some academics, that you could spend years of your life producing something that can be explained to a layman in a matter of minutes. maybe people want to feel that they have unlocked some secret hard-earned truth. but it would be a tragedy for humanity if all knowledge was so costly to acquire! personally, i think it's awesome that i can explain my research to uneducated members of my family. that the author had to exaggerate his point to meaningless hyperbole ("It takes... much more than a tweet" weren't we just making fun of this exact idea the other day? this is like my mom's understanding of twitter) kind of proves my point

caveat: obviously there is research that is just really complicated and technical by nature. sometimes the principal-agent problem is resolved nicely, as in science. sometimes not so nicely, as in macroeconomics where data is extremely limited and rather than admit ignorance, some academics become ideologues and elide the complexity and use their academic prestige to spout their political preference. but at least in the case of macroeconomics, i don't think anyone can argue that blogs have been bad for the field. quite obviously the opposite; they've basically become the new centre of debate in the field. that's so much better than debate happening in closed conferences IMO

personally, i have learned as much from reading blogs and wikipedia and the internet than i did in university. that's awesome because the internet is free. unless it can be shown to diminish the actual quality of research produced i support academic populism

part of my pov on this is that i am a big fan of big ambitious long-in-the-making intellectual books that only the academy seems to reliably produce, though not as much anymore.

― ryan, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 3:53 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

FWIW, i'm a fan of these too. i just don't see it as an either/or

i think this is the wrong thread for this debate, but i'll just say that, for me, academic work is distinguished by far more than just a question of its audience. and i think once you step into being, say, a "public intellectual" or ny times columnist or vox blogger or whatever, you've already made certain concessions to a discourse that doesn't have the same habits and rules as academic discourse. whatever you're doing, it's not scholarship. (this is of course a very humanities based point, but i think it applies across fields). i think there are very, very good reasons for academics to insist over and over again on the specificity (and that entails limitedness) of what they do and what they can't do.

you're right it's not an either or! i just hear from some in academic circles that we should stop writing books and should write more and shorter and more accessible texts. i think that is a trend that is very likely to happen, im just sentimentally opposed to it.

even those who /do/ write lots of peer-reviewed scholarly articles often seem to reflexively denigrate the form of discourse they entail. like they are embarrassed to even be writing in those forums, but do it for careerist reasons.

non-scientific scholarly fields rely in complicated ways on authority, which is why their entry into public spaces, or the dissemination of their works or ideas in some form or another into public spaces, is ahem 'problematic'

… which is also why the function of privilege in non-scientific academic disciplines is so much more fraught than it is in the sciences

ams: name names? that doesn't correspond to my xp at all. academics i know are more likely to express frustration at ideas being dumbed down outside of those forums

i love peer-reviewed scholarly articles and cherish my privilege of having been able to study for years to now be able to read them fairly painlessly. i love the culture of academic seminars; hearing profs rip into each other's research, exposing assumptions. but the extent to which this is done behind closed doors, in an ivory tower, by and for, experts... i think anyone who is interested should be able to experience that. imo you need to justify instances of not popularizing, rather than the other way around

argument from negative externalities, release of toxic garbage into a world unequipped to deal with it without coming to grief

non-scientific scholarly fields rely in complicated ways on authority, which is why their entry into public spaces, or the dissemination of their works or ideas in some form or another into public spaces, is ahem 'problematic'

… which is also why the function of privilege in non-scientific academic disciplines is so much more fraught than it is in the sciences

― j., Wednesday, June 3, 2015 4:39 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, totally. good point. i consider the social sciences scientific and (hope) my argument applies to them. but i really have no idea what contemp humanities even do or what popularization of the stuff you guys read would even entail. but i'd be eager to find out cause the primary texts are always inscrutable to me!

yes, i left open how a similar point would apply to the sciences because obviously the hard/soft (etc) distinctions track in different ways with the extent to which non-scholars do or should accept the deliverances of the scholars. it seems that certain amounts of authority play a role in social sciences, differently from 'pure' empirical grounding a la physics or biology, which is maybe why social scientists do not necessarily have so sweet a time with their own forays into the world.

"personally, i think it's awesome that i can explain my research to uneducated members of my family."

how uneducated? a problem with explaining research ideas in the humanities is that high school students won't get much background for these ideas. whereas in math econ basic science these students do get some background. Unless you're talking about family without high school degrees?

with high school degrees, but explained without any reference to math or anything. that was kind of a cheap shot because i have a personal preference for simplicity and "clean" research designs, and my work so far is about documenting simple facts about labor markets, which everyone has first-hand experience with. so my stuff is particularly easy to explain. aside from theorists, i'd say most of my peers' work is explainable to the same family members though.

my family members have never expressed any curiosity about my research - not when i was a mathematician and not once i became a philosopher. not even extended family including a shakespeare scholar. to them, my work is teaching, and whatever else it is i do.

I'm incredibly late to the self-conscious white male poet letter-writer, but my two cents:

There are really two main negatives to having more white male poets:
(a) Ingrained white male perspectives being written, yet again, in poetry that uphold a negative status quo
(b) white male poet gets published/publicized/space to the detriment of more diverse voices that lose out

basically the answer to (a) is to be cognizant of your own writing, and (b) is kind of addressed by attempting to publish only in forums that have a balance of diverse voices, and helping others who are not white men in your field attain success. the question comes off as kind of grating in that it seems like white male poets are the problem (I have my own opinions there but it's not relevant) but, barring a strong case of (a) where some backward-ass thinking is being professed, that's a misreading of the situation

white males aren't the prob, the lack of diverse voices and experiences is the problem. encourage those with those experiences and live amongst them, white male poet

that academic blog post is excellent, btw -- I am a strong believer that even in research you should be able to break it down to an extent where a layperson can understand the gist of what you are studying or creating, but there's no need to provide understandable results to non-experts at the individual level

math will never be explainable to family members, maybe if you're lucky there's a case of the theorem you proved simple enough to state in elementary terms. but i don't think the same discussions about popularization are happening in math. not sure how one would popularize philosophy research (whatever that even entails) but i love reading philosophers talk about stuff. like the new york times philosophy blog. just feels good to have someone go "woahwoahwoahwoah back it up--what do we mean when you say [x]?"

good post, flopson.

i must admit to coming at that post from a science perspective (astrophysics), where the idea of being smart in public is particularly seductive (people love astronomy) and where the system of knowledge required to "understand" pretty much any idea is necessarily going to elude pretty much everyone in yr audience. maybe things are different in other fields.

is totally backwards! of COURSE people believe things academics tell them they can't possibly understand. that's a GOOD thing. and it has always been so. people study engineering so that when i drive over a bridge i trust it won't collapse.

right, but he's not saying people shouldn't trust academic expertise. he seems to be be saying that having "spread ideas among an audience that cannot critically engage with them" as one of your explicit career goals (or incentivizing the people on your faculty to do so) is a problem.

coming from a workplace that does more bio-sciences, there's an entire conversation about the aims and means of what the research is about that can happen with the layperson. the actual technical stuff, I don't think I even have a strong handle on!

Follow Gabbert on twitter so been watching her interactions wiht several white males. When I looked at the piece I thought the letter was made-up - like its just the kind of thing to get certain in-house publishing issues out there in the open in a form that is more read, mainly to do with the lack of recognition for women/other backgrounds, and then to stop shit submissions from Martin Amis type wannabes.

My second thought was that imago wrote it.

and then vehemently attacked it as a cover-up. the perfect crime!

you don't get past me mister.

columbo.jpg

i dare say armagnac all round while we wait for the fuzz

leave me out of this

'Proper' writers revisit our themes:

http://kierongillen.tumblr.com/post/121183178782/a-first-stab-at-a-contrarian-position

oooh

Should fewer white men aspire to be doctors? Politicians? In almost any field, it would be better if there was more diversity, and I think it's good for employers or publishers to take proactive steps to ensure this, but as for individuals you only get one life. If you want to write, write.

Another concern I have is that this sort of noblesse oblige, stepping aside to give minorities a chance, seems a bit patronizing. It's also not the kind of thing that will lead to a real solution for inequality because it depends on people voluntarily foregoing their own self interest.

I think it's a big leap to go from "my perspective is limited by my experience. I should work hard to understand the perspectives of people whose experience of this society is different from mine, especially those who experience oppression" to "my perspective has no value at all. It's totally corrupted by my own privilege; however unwittingly, my agency is always a force of oppression in some abstract way." The former I think is what Peggy McIntosh (who I met - she was v. nice) was getting at when she coined "privilege" in the way we use it now. Checking privilege for her is a way of peeling away the assumptions and arrogance that prevent understanding. It's about shutting up and listening, sure, but not shutting up forever. The latter seems like the thinking that underlies these people who say they aren't going to publish anymore. It feels less nuanced and also more cynical in terms of the level of understanding it believes is possible to accomplish.

It's just a way of psyching out the competition. "The marketplace is totally unfair to me, we can't possibly compete on a level playing field because of centuries of structural oppression, therefore you should quit."

Some of the "not publishing anymore" screeds read more like pleas for absolution, from people who want to very publicly disown their relative race-/class-/gender-based power in a fairly easy way.

It's a lot thornier and more difficult to think about ways of actually listening to/engaging with/supporting those without structural privilege, and doing so in a way that actually creates a more equitable society and isn't patronizing and belittling to voices outside of traditionally powerful groups.

It's fine if you want to make a public showing of throwing away your power, but don't confuse that with actually empowering others.

Can't throw away your power, I thought the whole thing about privilege was it's something ascribed to you that permeates your existence whether you are "one of the good ones" or not. Psyching out the competition maybe but maybe that's too cynical. It does comes across as incredibly patronizing and self-serving, not really helping anyone but the one person.

And if it actually works or means anything, then being able to easily opt out of your privilege is just another privilege.

100% agree that you can't throw away your power, should have used quotation marks on "throwing away" in my post. My point is exactly that it doesn't work--by giving up publishing your writing, you are not in any way changing the power structure of the publishing industry/society. Random white liberals opting out will have no effect on the number of PoC/women/trans writers getting publishing deals and writing opportunities.

Public opting out or hand-wringing does successfully make attempts to be an ally all about the writer and their enlightened "magnanimity" though, which, like I said easier than the work of engagement/listening/support of those without those privileges.

http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/05/hurtful-things-said-to-people-with-chronic-pain/

innocent assumptions can do a lot of unintentional damage

― j., Saturday, May 9, 2015 10:54 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

http://inspiredbydis.com/2015/06/things-never-say-disney-bride/

“I can’t afford to come.”

on the list of things to never say to a disney bride.

fwiw i'm too drunk at present to weigh in here thoughtfully but heavens am i glad this pov is getting more measure here

drunk is the perfect time to finally explain urself

It's fine if you want to make a public showing of throwing away your power, but don't confuse that with actually empowering others.

― intheblanks, Wednesday, 10 June 2015 16:11 (Yesterday) Permalink

Wasn't this being done anonymously

I guess my objection to the logic of quitting is that nothing you do is actually "neutral" including abdication of responsibility which often merely increases strength of status quo