But who are all these journal articles for? Writing, reading and our unhandsome condition

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21512232
AutoresÁine Mahon (0000-0002-8134-8265, University College Dublin, autor de correspondencia), Seán Henry (0000-0001-8873-0726, National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
Año2022
Volumen52
Número1
Páginas23-35
Fecha de publicación2022-01-02
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCambridge Journal of Education (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0305-764X • E-ISSN: 1469-3577
EditorialInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0305764x.2021.1933903
OpenAlexW3167177046
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7
Referencias citadas14

This paper explores the nature of academic research in the Humanities. It questions whether such scholarship has been instrumentalised to a narrowly individualistic, short-termist and action-orientated pursuit – whether, in simpler terms, there is too much writing and not enough reading. In the first part of the paper, the authors argue that such instrumentalisation is evident in the very language we use; we speak of research ‘outputs’, research ‘impacts’ and research ‘targets’, and all of these terms position Humanist scholarship closer to archery than human understanding. In the second part of the paper, Mahon and Henry foreground particularly the relationship between scholarship and silence as well as the importance of close and careful reading. Throughout the paper, the authors draw on the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stanley Cavell in order to highlight a more edifying framework for research in the Humanities – one that might resist the darker impulses of a marketised academy

Academic writing · Aesthetics · Epistemology · Humanism · Individualism · Linguistics · Pedagogy · Political science · Scholarship · Silence · Sociology · Education, Philosophy, and Society · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy and Literary Analysis · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications