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Listen to the brilliant professor, Mark Bauerlein:

Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace
By Mark Bauerlein

Notwithstanding the diversity trumpeted by humanities departments these days, when it comes to conceptions of knowledge, one standpoint reigns supreme: social constructionism. It is a simple belief system, founded upon the basic proposition that knowledge is never true per se, but true relative to a culture, a situation, a language, an ideology, or some other social condition. Its catchphrases circulate everywhere, from committee meetings to conference programs. Truisms like "knowledge is a construct" and "there is no escaping contingency" echo in book prefaces and submission requests as if they were prerequisites to publication. Professors still waging a culture war against the Right live and work by the credo "Always historicize!" Neopragmatists, post-structuralists, Marxists, and feminists insist upon the situational basis of knowledge, taking the constructionist premise as a cornerstone of progressive thought and social reform. Graduate students mouth watchwords about subject-positions and anti-essentialism as if they were undergoing an initiation ceremony, meeting admissions requirements, and learning the tools of a trade. The standpoint functions as a party line, a tribal glue distinguishing humanities professors from their colleagues in the business school, the laboratory, the chapel, and the computing center, most of whom believe that at least some knowledge is independent of social conditions.

Get more here: http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/archive/2001/2/bauerlein.html


Try also the links below:

http://library.west.asu.edu/refguides/citations/mla.html
http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/19/1844225
http://biggerbooks.com/isbnbrowser2.aspx?isbnstart=0871

good luck

2007-11-04 01:07:29 · answer #1 · answered by ari-pup 7 · 0 0

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