Comments on: Squadratomagico’s “Circle of Life”

By: Jeremy Young

Jeremy Young — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 06:20:15 +0000

Some professors (my advisor, for example) love being treated like this. They encourage people to dismantle their work, while staunchly defending it unless convinced it’s been disproved.

However, I tend not to dismiss existing scholarship in the way you’re describing, because of the arguments you make in this post. I prefer the “standing on the shoulders of giants” approach to scholarship. In fact, I’m thinking of thanking some of the scholars I’ve built on and disagreed with in the acknowledgments section of my dissertation.

By: kb

kb — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 02:15:57 +0000

I would like to add two points to the discussion (somewhat belatedly):

1) In my PhD program in Australia there is a heavy emphasis on the assessment of the originality of your thesis. I would assume that this is not unusual at other universities, if not commom practice. Often this can be interpreted as “if I can show that so-and-so is wrong, I am doing something new”…or along those lines anyway. More elegantly work can be done to build on others peoples work, which brings me to…

2)… the difference in academic cultures. “Building on” or “extending someone’s research” were not at all encouraged at my university in Germany. Standard procedure in the class room was more like this: Student 1 formulates an argument or hypthesis. Student 2 says “yeah, but…” and dismantles student 1′s argument or hypthesis WITHOUT adding any other constructive thoughts. Discussion was more about shooting down other people’s ideas than about constructively building a new idea.

I absolutely loved being an exchange student in the US and learning this other, constructive style of discussion. So much more useful! I would be sad to see that the pressures of academia, be they the job market, publishing expectations, etc, affect the academic culture in the humanities to the degree of leaning towards a destructive, rather than constructive model.

I assume that the prospectus is the student’s way to stake their claim of why they need to be in the program, so it makes sense that they -with an ever-rising bar to get a scholarship in mind- try to impress with grand claims. Plus, sometimes, just sometimes, a fresh look by a fresh face can bring new ways of looking at a topic that the “elders” simply didn’t have a chance of seeing at the time of the writing of the book…

By: Ink

Ink — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:28:14 +0000

I wonder if it also has to do with the whole turbo-professionalization idea, the increased expectations for publishing earlier in one’s career?

By: PhDinHistory

PhDinHistory — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 01:41:16 +0000

Just wait until text mining makes its arrival in our profession. A friend of mind already knows how to use Google Books to carry out meta-literature searches. He finds generalizations and arguments in historical monographs that just don’t hold up when your computer surveys the full extent of the literature. He is too much of a gentleman to name names, of course.

By: Satsuma

Satsuma — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 00:36:53 +0000

Thanks Ink for doing this for your colleagues and in your “multiple reviews.” Perhaps maybe this will help people become a little more thorough in their theories to begin with.

Can we blame this on postmodernism?

By: Ink

Ink — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:38:09 +0000

“. . .or it comes from people who really haven’t done all the reading in the first place.” –Indeed! Lately, I have found myself writing the following on *multiple* reviews: “It seems important to acknowledge X, Y, and Z, who have done extensive work in this area.”

By: Satsuma

Satsuma — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:13:44 +0000

Susan’s comment was very appropriate:
“It’s really amazing when people talk about things that you have done without acknowldeging that someone else has thought about it before.” A truer statement couldn’t have been made about women’s studies or even women’s accomplishments worldwide.

I believe this ignorance is either deliberate, or it comes from people who really haven’t done all the reading in the first place.

After all this work to “reclaim” what women have done herstorically, you’d think we’d be on to this “erasure”** trick by now.
** One of the seven deadly sins of the fathers– Mary Daly’s analysis of how women’s work from the past is often unknown to women in the present.

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:43:44 +0000

I would say it’s much better to be erroneously thought to be “the orthodoxy” than to be ignored. It’s really amazing when people talk about things that you have done without acknowledging that someone else has thought about it before.

But I also think it’s a funny characteristic of some graduate student training that instead of thinking that their job is to build – extend – amplify they think they have to overturn. As I did my dissertation research, I think I became much more humble.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:43:08 +0000

What what what??? What is this “fall out of favor” that you write of?

There is a major difference between books and blogs: blogs can talk back, as it were. But, as we all know, this is the non peer-reviewed world wide timewasting web, so you get what you pay for…

By: GayProf

GayProf — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:17:50 +0000

If you think scholarship goes out of fashion quickly, just think about the speed that blogs fall out of favor.