rosepetalrevolution:

There’s a post circulating about how elevated academic writing is elitist and exclusionary and YES IT IS OH BOY YES IT IS.

But as a scholar who’s in the humanities and doing research and theorizing on complex phenomena, I think it’s important to shoot for balance. Scholars are in conversation with each other, not general audiences, in most of their published works. This isn’t just because the academy is elitist and closed off from most people (again, it totally is). 

This kind of language serves the very particular and important purpose of getting at complex ideas and hashing them out in ways that fully attend to their nuances so that knowledge can be expanded in new and creative ways. We would not expect physicists and chemists to not use the language that accurately and precisely describe the phenomena they are studying; social scientists and scholars in the humanities are engaged with equally complex subjects, and should be able to have conversations amongst themselves that utilize jargon or complex terminology or other languages so long as those terms actually help them say something that couldn’t actually be said otherwise (I say this last part because I think there are few things more annoying than new terms that are very clearly just someone trying to make their mark saying something that doesn’t need a new term). 

For example, Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance plays upon the dual meaning of the word in French, something that plain English simply doesn’t have access to because of the way this language is structured. The use of this term is functional, getting us to something that is incredibly difficult to put clearly into English words otherwise.

Rather than just decrying the use of jargon and technical language in these subjects, we need to make calls for other, more useful ways of making this knowledge and these conversations accessible to everyone. I think this looks like a few things:

• First, more popular publications by scholars from these fields. As the academy is currently structured, books for popular audiences don’t count toward tenure profiles for up-and-comers looking to get some job safety and academic freedom. Conversation within the limited sphere of experts is seen as the only valid labor. We need to free up space for our academics to engage with broader communities and encourage dialogue that moves out of the technical language of journals and peer-review.
• We also need to improve education at the earliest levels, because young people are more capable of dealing with ‘big ideas’ than we ever really recognize. This both means introducing children to the complexities of history earlier (for example, I found out this week that literally none of my students had ever heard of ACT UP before – refusing to teach our children about the issues that still affect this country does all of us a great disservice on so many levels) and making sure that literature and art classes include a critical thinking component. High schoolers don’t need to be reading Foucault, but a better foundation could be set simply by shaking up the way that they are encouraged and enabled to interact with the things they’re learning. This should, of course, translate into a college education that provides students with the opportunity to take a wide variety of courses and that treats them as full humans with multiple experiences and interests, not just future workers in whatever industry.
• Most importantly, scholarship needs to continue the important work of deconstructing and decolonizing the Western, masculine, Enlightenment standards of knowledge and evidence that have kept people of color, women, LGBTQ folks, working class people, and those with disabilities out of the conversation. I teach argumentation, and the last 3 weeks of class have been centered around helping my students recognize the ways that their experiences are valid and important knowledge and evidence. This goes hand-in-hand with the ‘foreign languages’ thing – if we’re only ever counting terms from French (coined by white French dudes) as sufficiently nuanced for academic use, we’re missing the point that I made above. All languages, cultures, and experiences are nuanced and complex – if we take them all seriously and make space for rethinking how we understand knowledge, the academy becomes a more productive, interesting, and most importantly inclusive place.

It seems to me that we should make calls for a more inclusive community of knowledge that is more focused on disrupting and toppling the dominance of straight white western men than blanket criticism of jargon and language use. Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler and José Esteban Muñoz and Jasbir Puar and Frantz Fanon and all the other scholars who have and are doing important liberatory work and engaging in critical conversation to school the white, western, enlightenment status quo are not the primary source of the problem of exclusivity.