{"id":36781,"date":"2016-12-30T02:00:02","date_gmt":"2016-12-30T07:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36781"},"modified":"2016-12-29T11:29:20","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T16:29:20","slug":"university-now-a-regular-source-for-what-wacky-stuff-are-they-up-to-on-campus-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/12\/30\/university-now-a-regular-source-for-what-wacky-stuff-are-they-up-to-on-campus-articles\/","title":{"rendered":"University &#8211; now &#8220;a regular source for &#8216;What wacky stuff are they up to on campus?&#8217; articles&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Will universities continue their decades-long flight from relevance to become the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.popecenter.org\/2016\/12\/american-studies-sad-tale-academic-decline\/\" target=\"_blank\">next decade&#8217;s equivalent of &#8220;Florida Man&#8221;?<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>My academic field, American Studies, is the interdisciplinary study of American cultures, past and present. Once it was a vibrant and useful discipline. Today, I\u2019m sad to report, it is a regular source for \u201cWhat wacky stuff are they up to on campus?\u201d articles and blogs.<\/p>\n<p>These days, when American Studies captures any attention, it\u2019s usually for unfortunate reasons.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, a jargon-y article wins an ironic bad writing award. Consider, for example this excerpt from a paper in the <em>Australasian Journal of American Studies<\/em>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life\u2019s everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum\u2019s observational\/expositional performances.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Sometimes a pop culture class becomes an extramural joke, such as the \u201cZombie Studies\u201d courses that were all the rage a few years ago. And sometimes an American Studies professor decides to use the classroom for \u201csocial activism\u201d where the idea is to substitute studying with protesting.<\/p>\n<p>I might chuckle if I weren\u2019t employed and mentally invested in the field, and if I did not have residual respect for the open-minded, pragmatic approaches which marked American Studies for the first decades of its existence. But sadly, for the last generation, American Studies \u2014 beset by a nagging awareness that making interdisciplinarity the norm when studying culture became mission accomplished at least 20 years ago \u2014 has scooted pell-mell towards politicization in a misbegotten effort to remain relevant.<\/p>\n<p>The result today is an academic sub-specialty wedded to a tightly-corseted belief that the United States represents the locus of sin (racism, sexism, colonialism, and the like) in the modern world, and that any study of America should restrict itself to call-outs and condemnations. American Studies now serves chiefly as validation system for academicians who know their findings in advance: racism, sexism, and imperialism.<\/p>\n<p>Increasingly, the field is hostile to scholars who don\u2019t want to use it just to berate American traditions and signal their imagined virtue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Will universities continue their decades-long flight from relevance to become the next decade&#8217;s equivalent of &#8220;Florida Man&#8221;? My academic field, American Studies, is the interdisciplinary study of American cultures, past and present. Once it was a vibrant and useful discipline. Today, I\u2019m sad to report, it is a regular source for \u201cWhat wacky stuff are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,13],"tags":[262,764],"class_list":["post-36781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9zf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36781"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36782,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36781\/revisions\/36782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}