--- info at pulpculture.org wrote:
--- info at pulpculture.org wrote:
> At 02:12 AM 5/21/2006, Gar Lipow wrote:
> >Hmm. So if you are an academic, you lose points if
> you explain your
> >work to a popular or non-academic professional
> audience. Ruddiman
> >has a maverick view on global warming (not a
> denier; he thinks human
> >climate modification goes back to the invention of
> fire. Most other
> >climate scientists think he is most likely wrong,
> but consider it an
> >interesting hypothesis that could be correct; in
> other words it is
> >not the majority view, but not crackpot.) Knowing
> it would be of
> >interest to public right now he has written and
> had published a
> >popularization - basically he took an average
> lengith scientific
> >paper, and wrote a book length explication for a
> popular audience.
> >Does he lose points for that? What if he produced
> an 800 word
> >simplification for E magazine?
>
>
> And this is what makes it so tragic, as I noted in
> another post. Feminists
> and left activist scholars have been chipping away
> at this. We've been
> working to show that we CAN hire people with no PhD,
> like Churchill, and
> they can be just as wonderful as any wanker with a
> PhD. We can hire people
> on the basis of publications that popularizations of
> scholarly work and
> they can be just as good and important to the field
> as any wanker with a PhD.
>
> He flushed that down the toilet and shat all over
> the people who made it
> possible for that university to hire him in the
> first damn place.
>
> so, if things were changing so that publications in
> non-refereed journals
> count for something, I'm pretty sure they won't be
> for another decade or
> more until this blows over.
>
> so, to answer your q, it may be diff for natural
> science, so I don't know.
> This is how it works in my discipline and likely
> Churchill's area studies.
> But in my area, in general, yes. There are always
> exceptions of course and
> my guess is that almost anyone who popularizes is
> tenured and probably Full
> Professor'd. At that point, they don't _have_ to
> play the game and can
> pursue their desire to make an impact on a broader
> audience. What was
> Zinn's career trajectory in this regard?
>
> Let me make clear: this has little do with clarity
> and clear writing. By
> simplification, I mean what they refer to at the AHA
> web site.
>
> let me tell a story. When I first met R, he was
> annoyed as all get out at
> all the qualifications and ifs ands buts or maybes
> I'd make about what I
> was saying when I explained something to him about
> my work or the work of
> others.
>
> AT the time, I was also transitioning from academia
> to writing for an
> ordinary audience and I was seeing how my academic
> writing was filled with
> too many ifs, ands, buts, and qualifications.
>
> Those are the things you have to do when you write a
> paper for academia.
> Why? Because..
>
> Well, read the statement on the code of conduct from
> the American
> Historical Association. They warn historians who are
> writing and speaking
> to public audiences that they must be careful not to
> present their
> interpretation as THE only one. They must be careful
> to always present
> their work as science, with plenty of "more research
> is needed" and "we
> can't make absolute claims". In other words, the
> basic approach in academia
> is to always be cautious or to at least balance your
> bold claims with a
> humility about the fact that your work may have
> proved wrong. After all,
> you're supposed to put it out there to find the weak
> spots in it! It's
> supposed to be found wanting by someone and so you'd
> better not adopt an
> air of utter certainty because you would then be
> acting as if the social
> production of knowledge and the contributions of
> your peer matter not a
> whit to you.
>
>
> but this is NOT what anyone at a trade press wants.
> They want a lot more
> certitude and they sure as shit don't want
> literature reviews where the
> author does what a scholar does and places his or
> her work in the broader
> body of knowledge through which one is speaking.
> They don't want to read
> anything that says, "My thoughts are these and
> here's why. Please do
> understand that Professor Paddy Wanker Soandso said
> X, Y, Z in response to
> this thesis. His objections are worthy insofar as X
> corrects the record on
> D. Y and Z, however, turn out to be problematic
> because Scholar
> Flufferhumper says this about such a claim. Given
> how I've systematically
> showed where my works fits in within this body of
> work and why it's unique,
> let me move on to the Main Event."
>
> So, you must speak with a certitude that is not
> called for in scholarly
> work and you speak as if you are the only one saying
> it, and as if you're
> working out of a vacuum. Knowledge production in the
> academy is supposed to
> be honored as a supremely social product. Knowledge
> in popular books is
> presented as if it was this one great dude thinking
> it all up and
> presenting it if no one else is working on similar
> things. As if, poof! one
> day you got a brilliant idea and wowie kazowie look
> at me ma! no hands and
> no training wheels and no one else helping me!
> wheeeee.
>
> And, the fact of the matter is, there's a hierarchy
> of Important Places to
> Publish.
>
> I was given the smackdown by Jonathan Sterne,
> Annaleee Newitz, and other
> years ago at the Bad Subjects list. At the
> conference I mentioned, I'd
> presented one of my papers on Habermas. I was
> approached by a small
> university press and asked to publish my work on
> Habermas. It was something
> they published and, because I was grounding
> Habermas's work in an analysis
> of my empirical work on new social movements,
> community-level unemployment
> and structural economic change, they thought that
> was the awesomest b/c
> there is very little work that shows how to apply
> this theory or which has
> tried to elaborate the theory and test it through
> empirical work.
>
> The Bad Subjects gang, all from much more
> prestigious universities, gave me
> the smackdown. Awwwww. What a crappy little press
> that is! Don't do it!
> Forget it. Try for something else. It's not that
> important a press. You
> should publish at the big places like us. Thus, they
> were telling me not to
> do it because it wasn't a big press and I probably
> shouldn't be publishing
> a book before the dissertation was actually done. It
> would make me look bad
> b/c I should 1. hold out for a better press and 2. I
> should only publish a
> book if it was for something they considered worthy.
>
>
> so, publications have ranking. The aim is to publish
> in peer-reviewed
> journals. Yoshie can edit all she wants, but it's
> not going to change the
> assessment of the wider academic system about
> someone who lists on their CV
> a publication at MRZine, ZNet or Counterpunch. They
> aren't peer-reviewed.
>
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