Academese

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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I've started an MSc recently, after 10 years away from formal education. I'm enjoying it greatly, but had underestimated the difficulties that a return to reading 'academese' would pose. I'm simply out of practice in interpreting simple points that are couched in unnecessarily complex and codified language.

Anyone have any tips (possibly from similar experience) for getting past this? Should I simply accept that some passages are completely opaque to me, and may or may not mean anything, or persist in trying to extract their meaning, with all the potential for madness, violent head-clutching and caffeine abuse that this entails?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Any thoughts? Anyone experienced the same 'Emperor's New Clothes' feelings on reading many an academic text, and unsure how much time you have to invest in soemthing before you can be totally sure it's empty of any content other than pretension?

Which is a pretty wide topic, come to think of it - less so with music, but defintiely with film and literature. Surely someone else must hurl books/DVDs across the room in frustration?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
"Development Studies", which could be a bit of a misnomer and could equally well be called "post-colonial studies"...
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Development and post-colonial studies sound very different to me. I would expect that post-colonial studies will be thick with "academese"; development studies, less so. That said, I kind of like pretentious jargon, so I'm probably not the right person to be responding to this thread...
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
vimothy said:
Development and post-colonial studies sound very different to me. I would expect that post-colonial studies will be thick with "academese"; development studies, less so. That said, I kind of like pretentious jargon, so I'm probably not the right person to be responding to this thread...
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yeah, sorry, shoulda qualified that - could be called post-colonial political/economic studies, or something. Some of the writers studied are certainly post-colonial theorist however, so there is a fair chunk of academese in many of the books I'm reading. I think this is what's slightly surprised me.

i don't mind the jargon so much as the particular sentence/argument structure, that i don't think is always that watertight. Or rather, when it isn't that watertight, it can be hard to tell if this is due to my bad reading of it, or a flaw in the argument itself, due to the particular ways in which it is framed.

Dunno if that makes sense. I suspect not.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
In my head, Birkbeck is home to the most pretentious, irritating academics and the most academese academese. Maybe I'm confusing all the Zizekregore doing stuff at Birkbeck with all of Birkbeck being in the Zizekregore, though.
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Well, that's fair enough if it's been your experience. My friend works there and is very far from being either pretentious or irritating, so I can vouch for him and a few people I've met through him! Tho of course i have knowledge of some awful people there too...

Such is life - I get the impression that there's a fair smattering (or more) of both ultra-pretentious academics, and also academics who see their role as a job with no application to the real world, in most universities. the latter I find particularly galling.

Besides, the lectures have been informative and straightforward - it's more a mior percentage of the reading lists that have struck me as overly indulgent for the points they are trying to make.

You'll have to explain- does Zizekregore = disciple of Zizek?
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
ok, interesting.

Anyways, i don't think any of those with who I'm grappling for meaning have any particular connection to the college itself, and are considerably less clear than the lecturers who selected their readings.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's funny, one of the laziest Hollywood cliches is where a 'science nerd' character explains something in technical jargon and someone says "Does anyone here speak English?" or words to that effect. Whereas in scientific and technological disciplines, jargon is generally well defined, so once you know what the words mean, sentences involving them are actually quite simple. "We applied [a process] to [a thing] and we got [this result]" - you could be developing novel photoelectronic semiconductors or debating the finer points of baking the perfect Victoria sponge cake, there's not really a big difference in verbal complexity. But (I would tend to assume, and baboon's posts seems to bear this out) it's in the humanities/social sciences that genuinely complex and sometimes semantically problematic jargon comes into its own.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
it's in the humanities/social sciences that genuinely complex and sometimes semantically problematic jargon comes into its own.
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I'm not convinced that there is actually that much difference in terms of effect. This is the subject of much debate at work (a maths ed research project). The most common story is one in which learning mathematics is akin to learning a new (formal) language, and that curriculum is structured in a linear fashion, such that students who miss the first few lectures are totally screwed. This is supposed to contrast with the much simpler humanities disciplines, where it's all wisyh-washy opinion based no right answers type of stuff. Except there are obviously conceptually very advanced theories in the humanities (Foucault, e.g.), and a lot of the conceptually advanced stuff requires a similar approach to learning as maths or other STEM subjects. So just as no one is going to be able to understand partial derivatives without first understanding a great deal of different mathematics, and then spending time with partial derivatives doing examples and getting inside the concept, no one is going to be able to come at Mille Plateaux, say, without first spending time with Marx, Freud, Lacan, Spinoza, etc, and getting inside the concepts.
 
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