SITUATED

Some nice quotes on academic literacy coming from the novel Boetekleed by Ian McEwan: “Want daar ging het natuurlijk om: hij zou een betere arts zijn omdat hij letteren had gestu­deerd. Wat een diepzinnige uitleg zou zijn gescherpte gevoeligheid van het menselijk lijden kunnen geven, van de zelfverwoestende dwaasheid of pure pech die mensen tot […]

Blogging Issue Publication Announcement Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture In the latest issue of the on-line journal Reconstruction several aspects of weblogs are being discussed. Craig Saper wrote an interesting article on ‘Blogademia’, where he discusses the phenomenon of academic bloggers (sic). There is an interesting passage on the relation between blogs and academic writing: […]

From November 17th till November 18th the HSN-conference took place at our department. HSN (Het Schoolvak Nederlands) is a two-day meeting for teachers of mother tongue (Dutch) and literature who have the opportunity to exchange good practices. At this conference the essay ‘De Cultuur van het Lezen’ by Ronald Soetaert was presented and one of […]

Richard Powers’ scientific humanism. By Stephen Burt If the term “science fiction” had no prior meaning, it would describe all the novels of Richard Powers. The MacArthur “genius”-grant winner, whose ninth novel, The Echo Maker, comes out this fall (and is nominated for a National Book Award), does not just write about scientists, programmers, and […]

On the other hand, border crossings can be problematic. For instance, the border crossing between humanistic and scientific subcultures has been a concern to science educators ever since C.P. Snow (1964) wrote The Two Cultures. Moreover, research into the difficulties of non-Western students learning Western science has identified obstacles experienced by students who have an […]

“To do science, then, is to participate actively within a set of subcultural relationships” (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 2004, p. 236). If I want to participate as a member in this discourse, I need to communicate in its given language. This is certainly true in the subculture of academia, but it is also true in the […]

Picture taken in Geneva at the ‘Place Bourg du Four’ Like Bourdieu and Fanon before him, James Gee uses Discourse (but with a capital D) theory and analysis techniques to investigate and explain how language works both to scaffold human activities and affiliations and to maintain social identities within social groups (1999, p. 1). Also, […]

Comment on blog: I’d just restate the implicit argument of Gerald Graff’s “Professing Literature”:  the criticism and discussion of literature has never really been at home in the modern research university.  We’ve imported our professional M.O. from the sciences (e.g., the scholarly journal that comes out four times a year), and I guess our disciplinary […]

From July 19th till July 23th, the 6th ACS Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference took place in Istanbul Bilgi University. There was no specified theme but the aim was “to construct an intellectual space for the international cultural studies community to meet, to give voice to different cultural orientations and researches…”. This was reflected in […]

The Social Construction of What? Ian Hacking Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book […]