Bein’ Privy to Privelege
Something I’ve noticed since my foray into full time aspirational academia is that part of holding any position of privelege is that you don’t have to reflect on your position. It’s very hard sometimes to find spaces within academia that are committed to such reflection. It’s also hard to go looking for them, when you don’t have to, and knowing that you will encounter challenges to your personal position.
In view of this, I really dig what this lady has to say in this article - not only about bloggers and blogging, but also about scholarship and the burgeoning professionalisation of intellectuals and intellectual work, including that of ‘intellectual radicalism’.
My departmental transfer should occur within the next fortnight, and well, how could I not want to ‘belong’ to an interdiscipline described in the above mentioned article as an avowedly “anti-elitist and reflexive epistemological project”, which pays overt attention to the speaking position of the academic, and spawns articles on topics like ‘counter-heroics’ and ‘counter-professionalism’? Yes please!
the problem is when an (inter)discipline is centred on peeps professing anti-professionalism professionally then the anti-professionalism gets, shall we say, professionalized.
Comment by charles — 6/2/2006 @ 3:02 pm
You should spend some time at the Uni of Adelaide’s English department. Tell them you have to work for a living and watch the baffled looks. I guess it’s more depressing in a uni humanities department because theoretically they’re supposed to be the people picking up on this sort of thing, rather than wallowing in low grade 2nd wave feminist theory from the 1970s.
Comment by Ianto — 6/4/2006 @ 7:41 pm
So true carlos … the spectre of Me Studies is never far it seems ….
Ianto: I don’t have to work for a living. VIVA PRIVELEGE!
Comment by ann — 6/5/2006 @ 1:23 pm