The case continues, we have had some result through the forced consultation but the question of release of the documents remains.

Hopefully, this can be settled soon because it is coming up to two years since I first applied to access the documents. Perhaps I should send the ARC a card to acknowledge our anniversary.

Actually, I do wonder how far it *is* off topic, given that clearly what is ‘academic’ to governmental types clearly differs from academic self-conception…

Increasingly managers are turning to the new technologies of communication, like MySpace or Facebook or blogs to surveil their workers. In this sense I admire N Pepperell’s courage in blogging, as many people seem to want to take such activities out of context. It does seem that some academics already are doing this.

‘Openness’ with students is also problematic, for if you are truly open with them with a range of things, take for instance if you are having a crap day within a crap year then you will likely be seen as lacking ‘professionalism’.

(I am not claiming that ‘professionalism’ is a defining characteristic of academia and unproblematic, but it is a story that can be used to discipline.)

And again other academics within the space of ‘the university’ are again likely to try and capitalise upon this in various ways.

So I feel that ‘openness’ may be one characteristic that is problematic in terms of defining an ‘academic’ (whatever claiming that particular identity may mean).

If a person was truly ‘open’ about all doubts about their own ‘expertise’ (whatever that may be) or present doubts about the ‘reliability’ of their or even all ‘knowledge’ then you pose a difficult situation in regards to (re)presenting anything to an audience.

If a person does not at some point assume some authority; in claiming a limited degree of expertise in a field of inquiry (say familiarity with a body of theory) then it is difficult to be able to (re)present any knowledge to another person.

In my view it seems a great deal of N Pepperell’s work (no, I have not viewed it all) seems to fulfill the characteristics of ‘academic work’. Perhaps claiming the title of ‘academic’ should not be done on some basis of ‘expertise’ or claim to ‘reliability’ or claim to authority to grant ‘privilege’ but on the basis of the work itself. But this seems also problematic, as then I could be interpreted as saying that ‘academic work’ is merely a genre.

(Sorry you got caught in moderation – should only happen the first time you post.)

I might be way off track here but I think your feeling of being out of place or out of step might stem from the ethos of openess that you bring to your intellctual engagement and your engagment with others in whatever space that occurs – academic conference, lecture theatre, tutorial etc.

Academia has a long history of exercising power through the construction of expertise and certainty is often considered the mark of this expertise as is familiarity with the literature or a given body of theory. In this regard, foreclosure has been the key, not openess.

To acknowledge and practice openess in academia is often constructed as a threat to the foundation upon which the whole enterprise is based – the foundation that gives rise to power and privilege. It also consititues a significant part of many an academics identity. Disturbing this can make people uncomfortable. It can also make those who dont conform to academic conventions look/feel out of place – like they are an imposter.

I think a conversation and debate about some of that stuff is well overdue.

Cheers

Sharon

I do of course have the periodic experience of wondering whether I “can” do something, or whether I’m not following something, or things like that – it’s just not what causes this particular reaction for me. So I’m not so much worrying about whether I have the ability to write specialist papers that are primarily oriented to people in a similar specialist place, as thinking through why my tendency is not to do this – for two opposing reasons, in a way: I both tend to be passably aware of discussions going on in other specialisations, which keep me from making certain kinds of claims when I know that these are contentious in other literatures, and I tend to struggle to “frame” my own work in terms of, say, some current discussion or debate going on in a particular discipline – I’m often not engaged with the… micrological level? of discussion in a particular field? I think? So I have some of the left-field tendencies of a non-specialist – I think I often don’t hit on things that interest specialists, but sometimes write things that get enthusiastic responses from non-specialists – and I’m wondering a bit whether this might be placing me in a non-academic space in some way – whether there’s an issue of disciplinary socialisation that I’m not meeting…

So, in terms of this conference, for example, I kept a running tally of the times various speakers went, “As we all know, Marx does [x]” (at this conference, Marx was a functionalist economic theorist – this seemed to be a sort of noncontentious consensus for both the pro- and anti-Marx commentaries). Now of course I’m not going to say, “As we all know” about Marx, because I’ve got a specific reading of Marx – I’m not going to present my own reading as something “we all know” or as though it’s self-evident and obvious, because it just ain’t… This is a “specialisation” of mine, in a way, although it doesn’t specifically align with disciplinary boundaries, and so of course I’m going to be more attentive to issues around readings of Marx. But I don’t have any reason to assume anyone else in the room would share this “specialisation”, so I can’t speak as though they share some common default orientation (or, I can speak this way, but I think it would probably cause confusion and buy problems…)

I experience something similar around, not only the way that theorists are mobilised in discussion, but also the way in which empirical problems are proposed, or research evidence mobilised – I’m just often aware that there is some dispute, some contention, and therefore wouldn’t feel comfortable casually appealing to a shared understanding of such things. But shared understandings often do exist within disciplinary boundaries – I run into the “hard” version of this occasionally when I’m co-teaching with someone, and they will propose covering a particular topic, and I’ll mention that it could be interesting to include reading materials over what I take to be some key debate over the issue – and I’ll often get back a blank look, and a “there is no debate” response. This will be because I read outside their particular field, and am aware of some other way the issue comes to problematised somewhere else, but this other problematisation or the sort of work done in the other field will be sort of… systematically devalued? by the person with whom I’m trying to design a course.

And the issue is that there may be a good reason for this kind of systematic devaluation – there may be some methodological issue that, as a non-specialist glancing into each discipline essentially from the outside, I basically don’t have the background to “get”. And even where this doesn’t apply – in, say, appealing to a consensus reading of Marx – there still may be a good reason to rely on a consensus reading: it abbreviates discussion in a useful way, so that people who do share a particular set of assumptions can then build on those to discuss a higher-level set of issues. Since my own “higher level” issues tend to require a set of assumptions that I don’t expect most other people to share, they aren’t really discussable, for me, in a one-off interaction – I need a much more cumulative interaction for that to possible – and, as a consequence, sort of feel like, when I do present in one-off contexts, I might be coming across as spending a lot of time on basic background, and not getting around to saying much else… ;-P

At any rate… I suppose I’m wondering if some (or all…) of my work might look pre-professional in a disciplinary sense. I tend to spend a lot of time reading works that were in some sense constitutive of disciplines, and much less time reading works that play out within the subsequent disciplinary space – and that sort of… rubs off… I’m reluctant to cite examples of papers that cause me to react – on the one hand, because the reaction is a fairly general one for me – skimming through most journals, attending most conferences, will cause me to feel this way – on the other hand, I’m trying to be clear that I’m not critical of the things that provide the excuses, so to speak, for me to have this reaction: I’m not critical of this kind of work, and I’m also not necessarily critical of the notion that my own work might differ – just curious whether this difference means anything significant, in terms of my current attempt to position myself in some academic space.

Sorry to keep trundling around this issue without achieving any particular clarity. Part of the problem stems from trying to process reactions – situations in which I’ll lay out some version of what I’m working on, and get this sort of tolerant amusement – and then I’ll ask what that reaction is about, and have the person refuse to clarify, because they’re certain that I must already know, and am just joking around with them… Or situations in which I feel like I’m speaking better – coming across more clearly – to non-academic audiences, or to non-specialist academic audiences, than to the specialisations that ought to be closest to my work: this just doesn’t seem reassuring, in terms of positioning my work in an academic disciplinary space, although it may be perfectly useful for other reasons… I just don’t necessarily find it reassuring, as a statement about my academic socialisation, to have people tell me that I sound like someone from the 19th century… ;-P

I thought I got it and now I’m not sure I do again. The paper you discuss in the post, the really good one, was a paper that doesn’t provide for non-specialist readers on the subject the paper addresses, and engaged very closely with the literature in that specialist field. That all sounds like something you’re capable of! Hmm.

Are there any works you know of that are online that you could point to as examples that feel roughly like what you’re talking about here – one that feels like what you want to do (or find yourself doing) and one that feels like the paper you saw at the conference? I very much want to get it, as your comments are suggestive and occasionally I have a moment of “I think I’ve had this experience” but then I lose that moment again.

take care,
Nate

I think the audience engagement issue hits closer (for me personally) than the specialisation issue per se: specialisation doesn’t necessarily worry me – I think it’s generally necessary, and my position (in discussions about, say, the disciplinary positioning of my own work) is that it simply specialises in a way that doesn’t fall into existing disciplinary lines particularly well. Technical terms or jargon don’t necessarily bother me, either – these can often be in aide of thought and they can be useful for presentation – sometimes, even the “alienness” and difficulty of jargon can be useful, in slowing down reception and flagging that “here there be tygers” and such…

I do, though, worry about the possibility of opening up for a discussion – one that can shock me out of established patterns of thought, as well as open up some of what I’m doing to people who might not overlap strongly. The point about postgrads having a particular incentive to take a “pedagogical” approach to their presentations is a good one – I would add that this orientation could be extended beyond postgraduate work, when someone is trying to have ideas picked up in a broader sense than might be required just for disciplinary communications within a well-defined field. There were papers at the recent conference that didn’t strike me as “academic” in the sense I’ve written about above (a fact which may obviate elements of this thread – if they can get away with this, I probably can too… ;-P – but there is still something I’m trying to understand here about how people sometimes react to my work): they were often quite complex and technical in their own way – what differentiated them was a concerted effort to break this complexity down, to situation themselves in a broader intellectual history that enabled at least some connections from other traditions, and similar steps that opened the paper in various ways to discussion.

But I’ll have to let this fade off for the night – exhausted… Apologies that I’m a bit all over the place – I’m trying to understand something, essentially so that I can decide whether I need to deal with it in some direct way when I write. But my sense of what I’m trying to understand is extremely fuzzy, which means that I’m not as able to useful to the discussion (in spite of having started it ;-P), as I should be…

Personally, my worry concerns whether the sorts of questions, and the sorts of things I want to “do” with the answers to those questions, can be positioned within an academic space. My response to Nate above – where I mentioned the not uncommon teasing that I’m channelling someone from the 19th century – may articulate a little more clearly than what I’ve written earlier, the sort of thing I’m worrying about. (With, again, the caveat that I don’t believe I’ve been all that clear throughout this discussion, because I don’t feel I have a clear sense myself of what’s tugging at me about this issue.)

I do see a linkage between content and style – or motivation, content and style – in my work – and I assume that such things are linked in others’ works, as well. The style of presentation that I use has to do with the theoretical work I’m trying to do, with a desire to be able to construct spaces for conversations that I think are fairly difficult to have, with the sense that such difficult conversations are both important and necessary. I’m just not completely sure why the academy should “care”, per se, that I want to have these sorts of conversations and should orient my work around them…

On your broader point: I do have a specific… ideal of the academy – I’m much more conscious of this in relation to teaching than in relation to my own research. I don’t have a specific ideal that academic research must produce something that is, say, accessible, or practical, or political – although my own work (as abstract as it is, and as strange as this might sound given how I write and what I write about) does try to be accessible, and parts of my work might have practical or political implications in a more everyday sense. But I don’t see any of this as “picking out” my work in any way that differentiates it necessarily from other academic work – I’m not sure I can create a fault-line here that captures my unease or sense of discomfort.

I suspect I need to tug on the thread about people reacting to my work as anachronistic – somewhere along that line, I think, I can hit closer to what might cause my sense that I might be doing something that might somehow fall “out of bounds”.

This may hit on some of your broad questions from a different direction: do we have something like a “normal science” in philosophy or the social sciences? Are the disciplines defined in terms of operation within established parameters? Does my work strike people as somehow regressing behind an established “paradigm”? And therefore, perhaps, as reopening issues that have been closed off for good reason…

Very tired tonight – long week, and I’ve just gotten back into town. Apologies if this is completely unclear… I can try to make more sense tomorrow… :-)