Best part of academic jargon is it’s basically impossible to argue against it because none of these words mean fucking anything, and whoever writes it can always do a Petersonian claim that you “misrepressented” what they said if you do.
Current Affairs wrote a pretty good piece on the problems with Academic language
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/07/academic-language-and-the-problem-of-meaninglessness
I remember the Sokal affair or something. So a physicist wrote a bullshit paper with sociological jargon about some real physics shit (totally false) and the sociological journal totally published it
The journal that published Sokal didn’t use peer review and they rejected him at first, then requested a bunch of changes that he refused. They published him because they were collecting articles dealing with the “science wars” between scientists and the humanities and he was one of only two scientists to submit papers for it.
It’s less of a big deal than everyone makes it out to be.
The more I read about the Sokal affair the more I hate everyone involved honestly.
Exactly, a lot of defensive sociologists will point out that it’s not hard to get fake papers published in predatory journals (I recall some papers about Midiclorians, from Star Wars, being published in a bio journal).
But Sokal got his completely bullshit paper published in Social Text, one of the leading American Sociology journals, which should have at least done enough verification to know that this is bullshit
Here my aim is to carry these deep analyses one step farther, by taking account of recent developments in quantum gravity: the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded. In quantum gravity, as we shall see, the space-time manifold ceases to exist as an objective physical reality; geometry becomes relational and contextual; and the foundational conceptual categories of prior science—among them, existence itself—become problematized and relativized. This conceptual revolution, I will argue, has profound implications for the content of a future postmodern and liberatory science.
I fucking hate that I actually understand wtf she’s hinting at.
She’s saying in a lot of bullshit words that warfare is historically masculine due to it’s trad-norm of “defending your home/family/stuff” or “getting a home/family/stuff” and that drone warfare, as she asserts, detaches itself from that traditional masculine role making it a lot more fluid in nature.
this is just really advanced “attack helicopter” trolling
Academese makes me want to light myself on fire. My MA definitely radicalized me on the topic of jargon.
Oh sorry, that’s the abbreviation for Master of Arts, the degree that I got. I spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME reading deliberately obscure language that is designed (in my opinion) to gatekeep. And this is coming from someone who loves fun vocabulary words. But the way so much academic work is written, you have to “be in the club” to understand it at all, and now I have a kneejerk aversion to that type of writing, whether or not the content is good. It sounds like I’m anti-education, and I’m not! I really just think that academic writing has turned into some kind of acrobatics where you’re just showing off for the other people in the “in crowd” rather than trying to convey an idea.
