Another Language Question: Language and Academia

I HATE ACADEMIC WRITING.

If I could make that statement any bigger I would. Fuckin’ HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE it.

It seemed to be less about making ideas and arguments and knowledge accessible, than it was about sounding smart and intellectual. Especially when it came to arts and the creative industries, where a lot of foundational material for your work would have been things hard to put in citation form - intuition and gut feeling, cultural knowledge and heritage, life experience, works that were more grassroots and personal rather than in an academic journal or tome.

When I talk about my passions or my ideas or my interests, things my heart or my brain or my spirit want to share, it’s the sharing I find important. I want to engage, I want to talk to people, I want to be listened to. I want to spark other thoughts and feelings and ideas, however big or small.

I want to especially reach out to people who understand what it means to never belong anywhere, to never quite be eloquent or graceful enough to express how you feel, to always be in this liminal space, to grapple with having privileges that don’t quite make up for shortfalls, to try and balance between pleasuring the self and selflessly serving the world.

The bolded bits is why I despise whitestream academia. I could write an entire blog on how much hatred I have for the constant policing, the sheer commodification, or how much it is a tool of isolation and works on making the isolated members perpetuate it.

I would much rather read a blog describing someone’s personal experiences with something because academia treats it like a theory to be ridiculed or mastered. Just look at the number of people treating us like access points, asking for our words to use in papers, to create ‘theory’, when theory is always in the interest of the theoriser, and serves their purposes. It never serves ours, even when it is built on our words, because the system co-opts it. (The other reason is that academics are seriously fucked.)

That aside, I encourage you to resist. Because there are always cracks, that’s how people like us exist and thrive. & there definitely exists an space’ beyond the one we are in, that we can reach through the cracks.

Best of luck.

∞Posted on March 23, 2011

Reblogged from: Creatrix Tiara

Source: creatrixtiara

Notes: 24 notes

Tags: kyriarchy,proud reverse racist,