Contributor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Anthropology of Knowledges | Digital Anthropology | Disciplinarity | France | Futures | Neoliberalism | Nostalgia | Social Movements | Subjectivity |
About Eli
Works on ethnography of universities and of French philosophy. Editor of Academography.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
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Academography and Disciplinary Ethnocentrism
Donald Campbell (1969) famously blamed the “ethnocentrism of disciplines” for academics’ tendencies to spawn “a redundant piling up of highly similar specialties leaving interdisciplinary gaps”. While Campbell never gives an extended definition of his term, disciplinary ethnocentrism would seem to entail, for instance, that one views everything through the prism of one’s field; that one avidly defends the boundaries of one’s field; that one becomes blind to closely related work outside one’s field; and that one comes to apprehend disciplinary identities as quasi-natural kinds, just as “ethnicities” are often misconstrued as essences. (more…) (read more...)