Category: science

Two of my maîtres à penser died relatively young. Michel Foucault was 57, Erving Goffman was 60. It is highly likely that I shall die relatively young as well. I’m 58 now, and I have been diagnosed with cancer stage 4 in mid-March 2020. Since there is suddenly very little future left to plan, speculate or dream about, one tends to use such landmark moments as a prompt to reflect on the past. The guiding question in this – quite an obvious one – is: what was important?

I will restrict my reflections to the professional parts of my life. This is, of course, an artificial segmentation, and readers must keep in mind that the professional part of life was always interwined with the nonprofessional parts, often in uneasy or poorly balanced ways. Perhaps that story should be told elsewhere. For now, I will focus on the part of me that was called “academic”.

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Let me briefly preface what follows by reviewing what was not important.

What was not important was competition and its attributes of behavioral and relational competitiveness, the desire or urge to be the best, to win contests, to be seen as the champ, to proceed tactically, to forge strategic alliances and what not. I did not have a sense that I had to be part of a specific clique or network, and I don’t think I ever made great efforts to get close to people considered to be important. If I was a member of such networks, it was rather by accident than by design – it happened to me.

I never self-imagined as a genius, individually measured against others, and individually responsible for the production of superb stuff that everyone should read, know, quote and assign to students. Quite the contrary: I saw myself as unexceptional, and as someone who would always need a good team around me in order to achieve anything. Given that academic life, in my case, was not a thing I had actively desired and sought, but a gift I received from others, I felt a duty to be good, as good as  I could be, and better tomorrow than today. So I worked hard, essentially taking my clues from others – the literature of course (a community of others often overlooked when we talk about academic achievement), but also contacts and friends with whom teams could be formed. Discussion and brainstorm were my favorite activities; they were in the most literal sense the ludic, fun, pleasure dimensions of academic life. What I did alone, usually, was the slow and careful analysis of data. But that’s the only thing that’s really individual in a range of activities that were collective and involved intense sharing, exchange and generosity. And even that thing – the data analysis – was usually submitted to the judgment of others before it could be publicly shown. So much for being the lone, unique and autonomous genius researcher.

In such contexts of collective sharing, conditioned by maximum generosity, changing one’s mind is self-evident. The very point of having a discussion or brainstorm – an “exchange of ideas” – is that ideas can be exchanged and changed, and that one leaves the session with better things in one’s head than before the session. Learning is the key there, and if I would be ready to pin one label onto myself, it’s the label of an eternal, insatiable learner.

Which is why I read massively all through my life. And while part of that reading was “just” reading, another part was studying. Most of my career, I was involved in some kind of study, collecting and selecting writings from which I wanted to draw advanced insights, useful for the research projects I was engaged in. I studied, for instance (and the list is not complete), structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, arcane things such as the works of Rudy Botha on Chomsky and the Functional Grammar attempts of Simon Dik, Talmy Givon and M.A.K. Halliday; but also the entire oeuvre (or, at least, most of what I could get) of Michel Foucault, Carlo Ginzburg, Bakhtin, Freud, Durkheim, Simmel, Parsons, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Goodwin, Dell Hymes, Michael Silverstein, Erving Goffman, Aaron Cicourel, Harold Garfinkel, Anne Rawls, Fernand Braudel, J.K. Galbraith, Immanuel Wallerstein, Arjun Appadurai and several others. I studied Marx and Marxism in its very diverse varieties, Rational Choice, Macchiavelli, Darwin, G.H. Mead’s work and influence, Dewey, Paolo Freire, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Okot p’Bitek, Walter Rodney, Issa Shivji and quite a bit of African political theory from the 1950, 1960s and 1970s. In order to understand a lot of that, I had to study the works of Mao Zedong and the history of the Cultural Revolution in China. And so on, and so forth.

If I have regrets now, it is about the fact that some of those studies will remain unfinished. I took great pleasure from them.

I disliked and dislike – intensely – the development of academic industrial culture that I was witness to throughout my career, with almost-totalized individualization of academic work and performance measurement, with constant inter-individual competition driving young and vulnerable colleagues to extreme and dangerous levels of stress and investment in work rather than life, and with managers emphasizing – without any burden of evidence – that the “single-authored journal paper” (published, evidently, behind a huge paywall) is the pinnacle of academic performance and the gold standard for measuring the “quality” of an individual researcher. Added to this – and this, too, I was a witness of – is the growth of a veritable celebrity culture in academia, in which mega-conferences take the shape of pop festivals with rockstar headliners bringing their greatest hits in front of an audience of poorly paid struggling academics who spent their personal holiday budgets purchasing a ticket for such events. Little truly valuable intellectual work is going on there. And identical to pop festivals, the carbon footprint of such academic rock concerts is scandalous.

Frankly, all of this is in its simplest and most elementary form anti-academic and anti-intellectual. It’s the recipe for bad science, not for innovation and improvement. I participated in all of it, for all of it became “new” while I was active – it was the culture that defined my career. That culture defined me as one of these rockstars for a while, and thus placed me quite consistently in the company of a small coterie of similar rockstars. It is not a thing I shall miss, for it was invariably awkward and alienating, and very often incredibly boring. And this new culture took away and delegitimized a previous culture, one of collegial dialogue, collaboration, slowness, time to think, to reflect and to doubt, periods of invisibility and absence from public stages – because one was doing some serious bit of research, for instance. And a culture in which one would write something whenever, and because something new had to be reported, not because one needed to achieve one’s annual output quotum or another “top” paper in order to be eligible for promotion, tenure or appointment.

A footnote: another part of that defining culture was university reorganizations, managerialization and budget cuts, with an increasing rat race for jobs (for which the intellectual world pays a terrible price), “customer-oriented” academic programs that had to be checked by the marketing guys as to their merits in a market of academic products, the decline of vital academic “support staff” and the almost-complete commodification of academic output – see the point about “single-authored journal papers” above, and one can add the metrics and impact mania to it. Academic publishing, as an industry, has become a disgrace and is an obstacle to science, not a facilitator (let alone an indispensable actor). Publishing has become a form of terror for young scholars, while it should be an instrument for liberation, for finding their voice and feet in the business. Burnout has now become an endemic professional hazard in academia, much like depression, unhappy human relationships and unhealthy lifestyles. It’s become a highly unattractive environment for human creativity, while it should be an environment, a specialized one, ideally tailored to precisely that.

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So that was unimportant. The important things can be summarized in a few keywords: to give, to educate, to inspire. I will add a fourth keyword later.

As I said earlier, my academic life was a gift I received from others. It was unexpected as a gift, and I was unprepared for it. When I received my first academic job in 1988, I mainly looked at people I considered bad examples, and I decided to not do things the way they did it. I essentially decided to be the kind of academic I myself would like to encounter if I were a student. If I had to teach, I should teach the kind of class I myself would love to attend as a student. And if I had to write, I should write texts I myself would enjoy reading. It’s a simple discipline I maintained throughout my career: it’s never about me, it’s always about the student, and my role is to give the student tools and resources useful and valuable for that student, not for me.

I realized early on that my role in the lives of the young people who were my students was that of an educator, not just a lecturer or a teacher. And once I realized that, I took it very seriously. I meticulously prepared every course I ever taught (and there were many), and I always rehearsed every lecture. I never walked into a lecture hall without a fully developed story and a script in mind for how to deliver it. If you have to teach, teach, and do that in a no-nonsense way. Make every minute of the class a moment worth attending for students, and make sure that they learn something in each of your classes. That sounds simple and straightforward, but it isn’t. It’s actually quite a tall order.

It starts from a refusal to underestimate your students. Many of my former students will remember that I would start a course by announcing that I would aim just one inch above their heads, so that they would have to stretch a bit in order to keep up with the pace and content of the course. I always did that: I gave students readings, contents and assignments often judged by colleagues to be too demanding or “above their level” – first-year students would have to read a book by Foucault, for instance. Well, the fact is that they did, and they learned massively from it. So what precisely “their level” is, usually and preferably remains to be determined after the process of learning, not prior to it. Prior to it, no one is “ready” for specific chunks of knowledge; they become ready through the work of learning. Not understanding this elementary fact, and assuming that students “have” a particular level that we, teachers, need to adjust to, is a dramatic error. In my career I have seen very often how this error leads to the infantilization of exceptionally talented young people, and to learning achievements that were a fraction of what could have been achieved. Please never underestimate your students.

Instead, give them the best you have to give. That means: don’t give your students old and pedestrian information, but give them your most recent and most advanced insights and thoughts. Draw them into the world of your current research, expose them to the most advanced issues and discussions in the field, show them complex and demanding data, and allow them into your kitchen, not just into your shop. For large parts of my career, I had a huge teaching load. I could only keep classes interesting for students and for myself by establishing direct and immediate links between my ongoing research and my teaching. I would take half-finished analyses of new data into the classroom, and finish the analysis there, with my students, allowing them to see how I made mistakes, had to return to earlier points, skip some particularly tough bits, and so forth. The good thing was: my frequent classes did not entirely eat away my research time, they were research time, and students were exposed to a researcher talking about a concrete and new problem that demanded a solution.

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It is at this point, I believe, that “teaching” turns into “education”. As teachers, we do not “transfer knowledge” and we’re not, in that sense, a sophisticated or awkward kind of bulldozer or forklift by means of which a particular amount of resources is taken from one place (ours) to another (the students’ minds). This is how contemporary academic managerialism prefers to see us. I have already rejected it above.

No. Whether we like it or not, we are much, much more than that for our students, and we have to be. All of us still remember many of our teachers, from kindergarten all the way to university. Some of our memories of them may gradually fade, and some of the teachers may only survive in our memories as vague and superficial sketches attached to particular moments in life. But some of these teachers are actually quite important in the stories we build of ourselves; and of such teachers, we sometimes have extraordinarily extensive and detailed memories. Even more: some of these teachers served (and serve) as role-models or as people who defined our trajectories and identities at critical moments in life. And when people talk about such teachers, we notice how closely they observed and critically monitored even the smallest aspects of behavior of their teachers; their actual words and how, when and why they were spoken; particular gestures made or faces pulled; pranks or surprises they created, and so forth.

I became very aware of the fact that, as a teacher, I will be remembered by my students. I knew, at every moment of interaction with students, that this moment would leave a trace in their development and would often be given a degree of importance it never could have for me. In sum, I realized that, as a teacher, every moment in which I interacted with students would be a moment of education, of the formation of a person, using materials I would be offering to them during that specific moment of interaction. My entire behavior towards them would potentially be educational material in that sense. And my entire behavior towards them, consequently, needed to be organized in that sense. I should allow students to get to know me – at least, get to know a version of me that could be remembered as someone who positively contributed to their development as adult human beings. Respect, courtesy, integrity, professional correctness, empathy, reliability, trustworthiness, commitment: all of these words stand for behavioral scripts that demand constant enactment in order to be real.

Several times in my career, students told me what could best be called “secrets”, highly delicate personal things usually communicated only to members of a small circle of intimi. Twice, young female students came into my office in deep distress, announcing that they had been raped – and I was the first person they called upon for help. While such moments were of course disorienting and caught me cold, they taught me that as a teacher I was very much part of students’ lives, in ways and to degrees I never properly realized. And it taught me the huge responsibilities that came with it: we are so much more than “academics” for these young people; we are fully-formed human beings whose behavior can be helpful, important, even decisive for them. We should act accordingly, and not run away from this broader educational role we have.

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The third keyword is “to inspire”, and I need to take a step back now. I mentioned the delight I always took in studying. The real pleasure I took from it was inspiration – other scholars and their works inspired me to think in particular directions, to think things I hadn’t been able to think before, to do things in particular ways, to explore techniques, methods, lines and argument, and so forth. Let me be emphatic about this. I can’t remember ever studying things in order to follow them the way a disciple follows the dictates of a master or an apprentice follows the rules of a trade – or at least, I remember that each attempt in that direction was a dismal failure. I was never able to absorb an orthodoxy, and to become, for instance, someone happy to carry the label of – say – critical discourse analyst or conversation analyst.

Whenever I studied, I wanted to be inspired by what I was studying, and I described inspiration above: it’s the force that suddenly opens areas and directions of thought, shows the embryo of an idea, offers a particular formulation capable of replacing most others, and so forth. Inspiration is about thinking, it is the force that kickstarts thinking and that takes us towards the key element of intellectual life: ideas. And science without ideas is not science, but a rule-governed game in which “success” is defined by the degree of non-creativity one can display in one’s work. The exact opposite, in other words, of what science ought to be. Science can never be submissive, never be a matter of “following a procedure” or “framework”. It is about constructing procedures and frameworks.

There were many moments in my career when graduate students would introduce their work to me, and preface it by saying things such as “I am using Halliday as my framework”. Usually, my response to that was a question: “how did Halliday become a framework?” And the answer is, of course, by constructing his own framework and refusing to follow those designed by others. People who “became a framework”, so to speak, took the essential freedom that research must include and rejected the constraints often mistaken for “scientific practice”. The essential freedom of research is the freedom to unthink what is taken to be true, self-evident and well-known and to re-search it, literally, as in “search again”. It is the freedom of dissidence – a thing we often hide, in our institutionalized discourses, behind the phrase “critical thinking”. I see dissidence as a duty in research, and as one of its most attractive aspects. I believe it is exactly this aspect that still persuades people to choose for a career in research.

Inspiration draws its importance from the duty to unthink, re-search, and question, which I see as the core of research. We can make the work of unthinking and re-searching easier (and more productive, I am convinced) when we allow ourselves to draw inspiration from that enormous volume of existing work and the zillions of useful ideas it contains, as well as from interactions with friends, colleagues, students, peers – allow them to affect our own views, to shape new ones, to help us change our minds about things. And in our own practices, we should perhaps also try, consciously and intentionally, to inspire others. I mean by that: we should not offer others our own doctrines and orthodoxies. We should offer them our ideas – even if they are rough on the edges, unfinished and half-substantiated – and explain how such ideas might fertilize – not replace – what is already there.

I have quite consistently tried to inspire others, and to transmit to them the importance I attached to inspiration as a habitus in work and in life. In my writings, I very often sought to take my readers to the limits of my own knowledge and give them a glimpse of what lies beyond, of the open terrain for which my writings offered no road map, but which my writings could help them to detect as open for exploration. This has made parts of my work “controversial” and/or “provocative” – qualifications that are usually intended to be negative but inevitably also articulate a degree of relevance and suggest a degree of innovation. I was usually quite happy to receive these attributions, and they never irritated me. It also never irritated me when I found out that someone I engaged with in conversation did not know me well, had not read my work and did not pretend to have read it. Usually, those were among the more pleasant encounters.

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These three things were definitely important to me in the professional part of my life: making a habit of giving, sharing and being generous in engaging with others; being aware of my duty to educate others and of the responsibilities that come with that, and to take that duty very seriously; and taking inspiration as a central instrument and goal of academic and intellectual practice. I can say that I have tried to apply and implement these three aspects throughout my career; I cannot claim to have done so faultlessly and perfectly – there is no doubt that I made every mistake known to humanity, and I am not speaking as a saint here. But the three elements I discussed here were – now that I can look back with greater detachment – always important, always guiding principles, and always benchmarks for evaluating my own actions and conduct.

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I now need to add a fourth keyword: to be democratic. It’s of a slightly different order.

I grew up and studied in the welfare-state educational system of Belgium, and given the modest socio-economic status of my family, I would probably never have received higher education in other, fee-paying systems. I’m very much a product of a big and structural collective effort performed by people who did not know me – taxpayers – and regardless of who I was. I am a product of a democratic society.

I remained extremely conscious of that fact throughout my adult life, and my political stance as a professional academic has consistently been that I, along with the science I produce, am a resource for society, and should give back to society what society has invested in me. “Society”, in this view, includes everyone and not just a segment of it. It is necessarily an inclusive concept. And science in this view has to be a commons, a valuable resource available to everyone, an asset for humanity. Practicing this principle became increasingly difficult because of the developments I already mentioned above: the rapid and pervasive commodification of the academic industry during my career. Academic institutions, and academic work, became and have become extraordinarily exclusive and elitist commodities, and academic work that refuses the limitations commensurate with this commodification are, generally speaking and understated here, not encouraged. I’ll return to this below, but I need to continue an auto-historical narrative first.

Working a lot in Africa and with Africans throughout my career, no one needed to tell me that knowledge, surely in its academic form, was not available to everyone, and that a large part of humanity was offered access only to hand-me-downs from the more privileged parts. One can take this literally: many of the school books used in the early and mid-1980s in Tanzania were books taken off the syllabus in the UK and shipped – as waste products, in effect, but under the flattering epithet of educational development assistance – to Tanzania. And almost any student or academic I met at the University of Dar es Salaam (which became my second home for quite a while in the early stages of my career) would answer “books, journals” to the question “what is it you lack most here at the university?” Bookshelves in departments were indeed near-empty (even in so-called “reading rooms”), and the small collections of books privately held by academics (usually collected while doing graduate work abroad) were cherished, protected and rarely made available to others. In the University bookshop on campus, shelves were also empty, supplies were dismal and most of the collection on offer was dated. (Its most abandoned and dusty corner, however, became a treasure trove for me, for that was where cheap editions of the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong could be found, donated long ago by the governments of the USSR, the GDR and China.) My own working library at home – the working library of a PhD student – was several times larger than some of the departmental collections I had seen in Dar es Salaam. To the extent that “white privilege” has any meaning, I had a pretty sharp awareness of it from very early in my career.

Inequality became the central theme in my work and academic practice from the first moment I embarked on it. And I never abandoned it. I wanted to understand why understanding itself is an object of inequality. Concretely, I wanted to understand why the story of an African asylum applicant was systematically misunderstood and disqualified by asylum officials in Belgium and elsewhere; why the stories of particular witnesses in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission were seen as “memorable” while others were forgotten or never taken seriously; why so many stories from the margins are considered not even worth the effort of listening to, let alone to record and examine; why some groups of people are not recognized as interlocutors, as legitimate voices that demand respect and attention, and so forth. This general concern took me, during my entire career, to the margins of societies I inhabited and worked in, and made confrontations with racism, sexism and other structural forms of inequality inevitable.

It also led to various practical decisions about how I organized my work. I will highlight three such decisions.

One. My experiences in African universities made me very much aware of the existence of several academic worlds, not the idealized one “academic community” sometimes invoked as a trope. And I decided to spend a lot of my efforts working with, and for the benefit of, what is now called the Global South. I am proud of official work I did with the University of the Western Cape in 2003-2008, where I coordinated a very big academic collaboration project on behalf of the Flemish Inter-University Council. UWC is a historically non-white university, and it still bore the scars of apartheid in 2003: the university was severely under-resourced and lacked the infrastructure as well as experience for building a contemporary research culture. Working in very close concert with the local university leadership – the most inspiring and energizing team of academic leaders I had ever met, and lifelong friends since – I believe we were able to turn the ship around. In the process I got to know a large community of amazing people who taught me a lot about what real commitment is – from Chancellor Desmond Tutu down to Allister, the man who acted as my fixer and driver whenever I was in Cape Town.

Informally, I did my best to work with and for scholars and institutions in the Global South, slowly building networks of contacts in several countries and trying to be of assistance in a variety of ways. The people I encountered through these networks usually didn’t have the money to travel to conferences where I appeared, nor the money needed to purchase my books. And this takes me to a second decision.

Two. I wanted to make my work available in open access and to create genuinely democratic mechanisms of circulation and distribution. Remember what I said earlier about science as a commons: I take that seriously. So, from very early on, I started series of working papers that enabled published high-quality material to circumvent the paywalls of commercial publishers. And as soon as the web became a factor of importance in our trade, I used it as a forum for circulation and distribution. Everything I write is first posted on a blog (this blog), and then usually moves to a working paper format in the Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, before it finds its way into expensive journals or books. I also became an early mover on academic sharing platforms such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate. And I am proud to see that a large segment of those who read and download my materials are scholars from the Global South – those who can’t afford the commercial versions of my work.

But my obsession with open access is not restricted to the issue of Global South readerships. My own students, working with me at a well-resourced university in an affluent country, cannot afford to buy my books. As I said earlier, the academic publishing business has become a disgrace, and it excludes growing numbers of people who absolutely need access to its products. I saw it as part of my duty to subvert that system, to share and distribute things usually not free to be shared and distributed, and to do so early on with recent material. For making old texts widely available is good and useful, but the real need for scholars in very large parts of the world is to gain access to the most recent material, to become part of ongoing debates, to align their own research with that which is cutting-edge elsewhere. And the academic publishing industry does brilliant, truly majestic efforts to prevent exactly that.

We should not be part of that industry, we should not be its advocates and we should not feel obliged to serve that industry’s interests. We are its labor force, and we provide free, unpaid labor to it. We sign contracts with them – non-negotiable ones, usually – in which all rights to our own work are handed over, appropriated and privatized – in return for a doi number and a pdf. We are exploited by that industry to an extent that most other sane people find ridiculous. While, if we do a little bit of creative work, we don’t need that industry any longer. As academics, we have an idea of the audiences for our work out there that is far more precise than that of any marketing officer in an academic publishing firm. We also have a very good idea of who might be knowledgeable and reliable reviewers of our work. And we just need a website to post our work when it’s ready for publication – offering it free of charge and without constraints on sharing to anyone interested in it, not to all those who have paid a certain amount of cash for it.

Three. Throughout my career, I never stopped addressing non-academic audiences. I gave literally hundreds of lectures, workshops, training sessions and public debates for professionals and activists in a range of fields – education, social work, care, law, policing, antiracism, feminism, support to refugees, youth organizations, trade unions and political parties. As a rule I did so without charging a fee (see what I said earlier about giving things back to society), and the default answer to invitations was “yes”. I always found such activities rewarding, and the audiences I met through such activities were often extraordinarily energizing ones. I also continued to write materials in Dutch. Over a dozen books, if I am not mistaken, and piles of articles – all written for lay audiences, often based on my ongoing research, and often used in professional training programs. It was my way of trying to bring recent science to a broader public forum quickly. For social workers or teachers in multilingual classrooms should not be given information that was valid a decade ago; they should get the most advanced insights and understandings available and take these into their practices.

I used a label for the things I mentioned in this section. I called it “knowledge activism“. In a world in which knowledge is at once more widely available than ever before, and more exclusive and elitist than ever before, knowledge is a battlefield and those professionally involved in it must be aware of that. Speaking for myself: a neutral stance towards knowledge is impossible, for it would make knowledge anodyne, powerless, of little significance in the eyes of those exposed to it. Which is why we need an activist attitude, one in which the battle for power-through-knowledge is engaged, in which knowledge is activated as a key instrument for the liberation of people, and as a central tool underpinning any effort to arrive at a more just and equitable society. I have been a knowledge professional, indeed. But understanding what I have done as a professional is easier when one realizes the activism which, at least for me, made it worthwhile being a professional.

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I will stop here. I have reviewed four things that I found important, looking back at a career as an academic that started in 1988 and is about to end. As I said, one should not read this review of important principles as the autobiography of a saint. I was evidently not perfect, made loads of errors, have been unjust to people, have made errors of judgment, have indulged in a culture of academic stardom and overachievement which I should have identified, right from the start, as superficial and irrelevant; I have been impossible to work with at times, grumpy and unpleasant at even more times, and so on. I am an ordinary person. But I do believe that I can say that I tried really hard to organize the professional part of my life according to the four points discussed here, and that the attempt, modest as it was, made that part of my life valuable to me. The satisfaction I draw from that is sufficient to end that part of my life without remorse, and without a sense of having missed out or of having been short-changed by others. I am happy to stop here.

Jan Blommaert 

Can we agree that Albert Einstein was a scientist? That he was a good one (in fact, a great one)? And that his scientific work has been immeasurably influential?

I’m asking these silly questions for a couple of reasons. One: Einstein would, in the present competitive academic environment, have a really hard time getting recognized as a scientist of some stature. He worked in a marginal branch of science – more on this in a moment – and the small oeuvre he published (another critical limitation now) was not written in English but in German. His classic articles bore titles such as “Die vom Relativätsprinzip geforderte Trägheit der Energie” and appeared in journals called “Annalen der Physik” or “Beiblätter zu den Annalen der Physik”. Nobody would read such papers nowadays.

Two, his work was purely theoretical. That means that it revolved around the production of new ideas, or to put it more bluntly, around imagination. These forms of imagination were not wild or unchecked – it wasn’t “anything goes”. They were based on a comprehensive knowledge of the field in which he placed these ideas (the “known facts of science”, one could say, or “the state of the art” in contemporary jargon ), and the ideas themselves presented a synthesis, sweeping up what was articulated in fragmentary form in various sources and patching up the gaps between the different fragments. His ideas, thus, were imagined modes of representation of known facts and new (unknown but hypothetical and thus plausible or realistic) relations between them.

There was nothing “empirical” about his work. In fact, it took decades before aspects of his theoretical contributions were  supported by empirical evidence, and other aspects still await conclusive empirical proof. He did not construct these ideas in the context of a collaborative research project funded by some authoritative research body – he developed them in a collegial dialogue with other scientists, through correspondence, reading and conversation. In the sense of today’s academic regime, there was, thus, nothing “formal”, countable, measurable, structured, justifiable, or open to inspection to the way he worked. The practices that led to his theoretical breakthroughs would be all but invisible on today’s worksheets and performance assessment forms.

As for “method”, the story is even more interesting. Einstein would rather systematically emphasize the disorderly, even chaotic nature of his work procedures, and mention the fact (often also confirmed by witnesses) that, when he got stuck, he would leave his desk, papers and notebooks, pick up his violin and play music until the crucial brainwave occurred. He was a supremely gifted specialized scholar, of course, but also someone deeply interested (and skilled) in music, visual art, philosophy, literature and several other more mundane (and “unscientific”) fields. His breakthroughs, thus, were not solely produced by advances in the methodical disciplinary technique he had developed; they were importantly triggered by processes that were explicitly non-methodical and relied on “stepping out” of the closed universe of symbolic practices that made up his science.

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Imagine, now, that we would like to train junior scholars to become new Einsteins. How would we proceed? Where would we start?

Those familiar with contemporary research training surely know what I am talking about: students are trained to become “scientists” by doing the opposite of what turned Einstein into the commanding scientist he became. The focus these days is entirely – and I am not overstating this – on the acquisition, development and refining of methods to be deployed on problems which in turn are grounded in assumptions by means of hypotheses. Research training now is the training of practicing that model. The problems are defined by the assumptions and discursively formulated through the hypotheses – so they tolerate little reflection or unthinking, they are to be adopted. And what turns the student’s practices into “science” is the disciplined application of acquired methods to such problems resting on such assumptions. This, then, yields scientific facts either confirming or challenging the “hypotheses” that guided the research, and the production of such facts-versus-hypotheses is called scientific research. Even more: increasingly we see that only this procedure is granted the epithet of “scientific” research.

The stage in which ideas are produced is entirely skipped. Or better, the tactics, practices and procedures for constructing ideas are eliminated from research training. The word “idea” itself is often pronounced almost with a sense of shame, as an illegitimate and vulgar term better substituted by formal jargonesque (but equally vague) terms such as “hypothesis”. While, in fact, the closest thing to “idea” in my formulation is the term “assumption” I used in my description of the now dominant research model. And the thing is that while we train students to work from facts through method to hypotheses in solving a “problem”, we do not train them to questions the underlying assumptions that formed both the “problem” they intend to address and the epistemological and methodological routes designed to solve such problems. To put it more sharply, we train them in accepting a priori the fundamental issues surrounding and defining the very stuff they should inquire into and critically question: the object of research, its relations with other objects, the “evidence” we shall accept as elements adequately constructing this object, and the ways in which we can know, understand and communicate all this. We train them, thus, in reproducing – and suggestively confirming – the validity of the assumptions underlying their research.

“Assumptions” typically should be statements about reality, about the fundamental nature of phenomena as we observe and investigate them among large collectives of scientists. Thus, an example of an assumption could be “humans produce meaning through the orderly grammatical alignment of linguistic forms”. Or: “social groups are cohesive when they share fundamental values, that exist sociocognitively in members’ minds”.  Or “ethnicity defines and determines social behavior”. One would expect such assumptions to be the prime targets of continuous critical reassessment in view (precisely) of the “facts” accumulated on aspects that should constitute them. After all, Einstein’s breakthroughs happened at the level of such assumptions, if you wish. Going through recent issues of several leading journals, however, leads to a perplexing conclusion: assumptions are nearly always left intact. Even more: they are nearly always confirmed and credentialed by accumulated “facts” from research – if so much research can be based on them, they must be true, so it seems. “Proof” here is indirect and by proxy, of course – like miracles “proving” the sacred powers of an invoked Saint.

Such assumptions effectively function not as statements about the fundamental nature of objects of research, open for empirical inspection and critique, but as axiomatic theses to be “believed” as a point of departure for research. Whenever such assumptions are questioned, even slightly, the work that does so is instantly qualified as “controversial” (and, in informal conversations, as “crackpot science” or “vacuous speculation”). And “re-search”, meaning “searching again”, no longer means searching again da capo, from step 1, but searching for more of the same. The excellent execution of a method and its logic of demonstration is presented as conclusive evidence for a particular reality. Yes, humans do indeed produce meaning through the orderly grammatical alignment of linguistic forms, because my well-crafted application of a method to data does not contradict that assumption. The method worked, and the world is chiseled accordingly.

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Thus we see that the baseline intellectual attitude of young researchers, encouraged or enforced and positively sanctioned – sufficient, for instance, to obtain a doctoral degree and get your work published in leading journals, followed by a ratified academic career – is one in which accepting and believing are key competences, increasingly even the secret of success as a researcher. Not unthinking the fundamental issues in one’s field, and abstaining from a critical inquisitive reflex in which one looks, unprompted, for different ways of imagining objects and relations between them, eventually arriving at new, tentative assumptions (call them ideas now) – is seen as being “good” as a researcher.

The reproductive nature of such forms of research is institutionally supported by all sorts of bonuses. Funding agencies have a manifest and often explicit preference for research that follows the clear reproductive patterns sketched above. In fact, funding bodies (think of the EU) often provide the fundamental assumptions themselves and leave it to researchers to come up with proof of their validity. Thus, for instance, the EU would provide in its funding calls assumptions such as “security risks are correlated with population structure, i.e. with ethnocultural and religious diversity” and invite scientific teams to propose research within the lines of defined sociopolitical reality thus drawn. Playing the game within these lines opens opportunities to acquire that much-coveted (and institutionally highly rewarded) external research funding – an important career item in the present mode of academic politics.

There are more bonuses. The reproductive nature of such forms of research also ensures rapid and high-volume streams of publications. The work is intellectually extraordinarily simple, really, even if those practicing it will assure us that it is exceedingly hard: no fundamental (and often necessarily slow) reflection, unthinking and imaginative rethinking are required, just the application of a standardized method to new “problems” suffices to achieve something that can qualify as (new or original) scientific fact and can be written down as such. Since literature reviews are restricted to reading nothing fundamentally questioning the assumptions, but reading all that operates within the same method-problem sphere, published work quickly gains high citation metrics, and the journals carrying such work are guaranteed high impact factors – all, again, hugely valuable symbolic credit in today’s academic politics. Yet, reading such journal issues in search for sparkling and creative ideas usually turns into a depressing confrontation with intellectual aridity. I fortunately can read such texts as a discourse analyst, which makes them at least formally interesting to me. But that is me.

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Naturally, but unhappily, nothing of what I say here is new. It is worth returning to that (now rarely consulted) classic by C. Wright Mills, “The Sociological Imagination” (1959) to get the historical perspective right. Mills, as we know, was long ago deeply unhappy with several tendencies in US sociology. One tendency was the reduction of science to what he called “abstracted empiricism” – comparable to the research model I criticized here. Another was the fact that this abstracted empiricism took the “grand theory” of Talcott Parsons for granted as assumptions in abstracted empirical research. A poor (actually silly) theory vulnerable to crippling empirical criticism, Mills complained, was implicitly confirmed by the mass production of specific forms of research that used the Parsonian worldview as an unquestioned point of departure. The title of his book is clear: in response to that development, Mills strongly advocated imagination in the sense outline earlier, the fact that the truly creative and innovative work in science happens when scientists review large amounts of existing “known facts” and reconfigure them into things called ideas. Such re-imaginative work – I now return to a contemporary vocabulary – is necessarily “slow science” (or at least slower science), and is effectively discouraged in the institutional systems of academic valuation presently in place. But those who neglect, dismiss or skip it do so at their own peril, C. Wright Mills insisted.

It is telling that the most widely quoted scholars tend to be people who produced exactly such ideas and are labeled as “theorists” – think of Darwin, Marx, Foucault, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Popper, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Hayek, Hegel and Kant. Many of their most inspiring works were nontechnical, sweeping, bold and provocative – “controversial” in other words, and open to endless barrages of “method”-focused criticism. But they influenced, and changed, so much of the worldviews widely shared by enormous communities of people worldwide and across generations.

It is worth remembering that such people did really produce science, and that very often, they changed and innovated colossal chunks of it by means of ideas, not methods. Their ideas have become landmarks and monuments of science (which is why everyone knows Einstein but only very few people know the scientists who provided empirical evidence for his ideas). It remains worthwhile examining their works with students, looking closely at the ways in which they arrived at the ideas that changed the world as we know it. And it remains imperative, consequently, to remind people that dismissing such practices as “unscientific” – certainly when this has effects on research training – denies imperious scientific efforts, inspiring and forming generations of scientists, the categorical status of “science”, reserving it for a small fraction of scientific activities which could, perhaps far better, be called “development” (as in “product development”). Whoever eliminates ideas from the semantic scope of science demonstrates a perplexing lack of them. And whoever thinks that scientific ideas are the same as ideas about where to spend next year’s holiday displays a tremendous lack of familiarity with science.

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Much of what currently dominates the politics and economies of science (including how we train young scientists) derives its dominant status not from its real impact on the world of knowledge but from heteronomic forces operating on the institutional environments for science. The funding structure, the rankings, the metrics-based appraisals of performance and quality, the publishing industry cleverly manipulating all that – those are the engines of “science” as we now know it. These engines have created a system in which Albert Einstein would be reduced to a marginal researcher – if a researcher at all. If science is supposed to maintain, and further develop, the liberating and innovative potential it promised the world since the era of Enlightenment, it is high time to start questioning all that, for an enormous amount of what now passes as science is astonishingly banal in its purpose, function and contents, confirming assumptions that are sometimes simply absurd and surreal.

We can start by talking to the young scholars we train about the absolutely central role of ideas in scientific work, encourage them to abandon the sense of embarrassment they experience whenever they express such ideas, and press upon them that doing scholarly work without the ambition to continue producing such ideas is, at best, a reasonably interesting pastime but not science.

Related texts

https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2015/06/27/when-scientific-became-a-synonym-for-unrealistic/

https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2015/04/13/investing-in-higher-education/

https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2014/10/15/the-power-of-free-in-search-of-democratic-academic-publishing-strategies/

https://alternative-democracy-research.org/2015/06/10/rationalizing-the-unreasonable-there-are-no-good-academics-in-the-eu/

Jan Blommaert 

Responses to a survey on this topic, March 2015 (courtesy Tina Palivos & Heath Cabot).

How would you define or describe research  and social action? Tell us a little bit about your background and your experience in both of these areas.

JB: Research is social action; the fact that the question separates both presupposes “social action” as an “abnormal” aspect of research, while research is always and inevitably social action: an action performed in a real social environment, and infused with elements from a preceding state as well as leading to effects in a posterior state.

The question, rather, would thus be which specific type of social action research would be, and I understand your question as pertaining to what one could call “activist research”, i.e. research that is critical of existing social relations and attempts, at least within the boundaries of research, to amend or alter them, usually in favor of a more equitable or balanced idea of social relations.

Such activist research, I would argue, takes sides in the sense that, based on a preceding analysis of social relations, researchers decide to side with the weakest party in the system and deploy their research in an attempt to provide that weaker party with new intellectual tools for addressing their situation. These tools can be self-analytic – to provide an accurate analysis of the situation of systemic inferiority in which the group is placed – or general-analytic – a critical analysis of the entire system with its various positions and challenges; and such tools are invariably discursive: the forms of analysis provide new discursive, argumentative and representational tools.

Briefly describe academic knowledge or know‐how? Activist knowledge or know‐how?

JB: Knowledge is one, the discourses in which knowledge is articulated are the point here. “Activist”, as in the description above, represents a discursive scale level in which “esoteric” academic knowledge is converted into discourses of wider currency (“simpler” discourses, if you wish), without sacrificing the analytical accuracy and power of the academic discourses.

Do you see them as distinct? If yes, how? How do they overlap, if at all?

JB: Note that the function of both discourses is different; while academic discourse is there to circulate in and convince small circles of peers, activist knowledge must circulate in and convince far broader audiences and systems of mediation (e.g. mass media).

In your experience, how do these areas complement each other?

JB: Personally, I could never find sufficient satisfaction in “pure” academic work if it would lack the dimension of advocacy and appeal to broader and more complex audiences. Science does have the potential to change the world, so one should not be satisfied with just changing the academic world alone. As a scientist, we all have a duty towards the power of science: to use it carefully, justly and for the benefit of humanity, not just a small subset of it. Being a scientist, for me, commits us to these fundamental humanistic duties.

In my case, I complemented my “purely” academic oeuvre always with the writing of low-threshold, Dutch-language books (12 or 13 by now), converting research achievements into texts that could be used in grassroots mobilization, professional training or general-interest reading and instruction. This activity comes with a great deal of lecturing and debating for the audiences addressed by the low-threshold books, which is both a lot harder than academic lecturing (academics are usually very civil and polite towards one another), and a lot more rewarding (convincing and changing the minds of an audience of 300 schoolteachers, train drivers or longshoremen gives one a sense of relevance rarely matched by convincing a handful of academics).

For you, what are the tensions or conflicts between activism and academic work that you have come across? What would you do (or have you done) to resolve these conflicts or tensions? 

JB: The conflicts are diverse:

-No real career bonuses can be obtained for “advocacy” work, if it doesn’t come with “purely” academic aspects; a real problem, specifically for junior researchers. In my research group, we also “count” advocacy outputs.

-A permanent battle against stereotypes of the researcher as ivory-tower fellows out of touch with “reality” (we produce “theory” as opposed to “reality”). Easy to remedy: just talk about reality, show relevance in their terms

-Debate is far harder, more violent and sometimes highly unpleasant in the wider public arena; one must be able to withstand brutal public allegations, insults and accusations. It’s not a good place to be in for sensitive souls.

But let me also address the advantages and benefits. In my experience, a connection between research and activism improves research. If you wish to solve one single real-world problem of one single individual, you quickly discover the inadequacies of our toolkits and the demand to come up with better and more precise science. If I have ever made “breakthroughs”, it was because I had a sharp awareness of the fact that someone’s life literally depended on it. Believe me, that is a powerful engine.

What do you think are the most important and necessary ways in which research and social action could be linked, bridged, or integrated?

JB: All science should benefit humanity, general interests rather than specific ones. In methodology, we attempt to achieve this by means of generalization from isolated facts (i.e. theory). And too little is done, in actual fact, to make this mechanism into a general educational principle for all.

Are there any stumbling blocks or concerns you would have around projects that seek to bridge or bring together research and social action, and academic and activist worlds, to create modes of knowledge and collaboration? How might these be ameliorated?

JB: My very first answer addressed the presupposition underlying your question: the fact that “social action” is seen as separate from scientific action, and I see this as a major problem, an “ideology” if you wish, in which research is seen as in itself value-free (“objective”), to which “value” can be added after research, either as hard cash (licences, patents, industrial contracts etc) or as soft capital (impact on the nonacademic field, as it’s called nowadays). It is a crazy assumption which denies the fundamental sociological given of research: that it is, like any social action, a historically, socioculturally and politically situated activity. I always ask the question “why now?” when addressing research questions – how come we find this a researchable question here-and-now and not, for instance, in the 1970s of 1990s? The real answer to this question leads us into an analysis of scientists as people addressing problems from within a subjective position, defined only partly by “objective” facts of science and far more by the concrete social positions from which they attack questions and problems.

This is clearest (while often least understood) when we talk about research funding. There is a strong suggestion that external money is “neutral” in the sense that it does not pre-script research. In actual fact, it does script it substantively. If the EU opens a funding line on a particular topic, think of “security”, this funding line incorporates the current interests and needs of the EU (combating terror and transnational crime, for instance), excluding others (e.g. not combating these things). The “priorities” defined in such funding calls are always someone’s priorities, and rarely those of the scientists themselves. Scientists have to adjust to them, and this means that they have to adjust to subjective positions defined by funding bodies, within which they can then proceed to do “objective” research.

It is this myth about research – that it is in itself only “good” or “excellent” if and only if it is “value free” – that poisons the debate and the climate on science and society these days. It enables scientists to escape their accountability for what they are doing, and denies them the dialogue on effective social effects of which they should be very much part.