They would have you believe that they are intellectually promiscuous and happy to nibble on anybody’s neck. Third, academic vampires have appropriated for themselves the moral and institutional superiority that comes with being inter – or, in the current jargon – post-disciplinary. Whenever a hapless psychologist or early childhood development researcher goes public with their latest empirical findings on the effects of playing computer games on a child’s cognitive development, the media studies ghouls can’t wait to line up and appear on television to denounce such research for its value assumptions and reassure parents who let their children watch whatever they want that there is no definitive causal link between what you watch on the tube and what kind of adolescent or adult you turn out to be. Second, there is the vampire trick of saying, “Well, there is no proof that the world is real or that real effects take place.” This rhetorical gesture is rife in fields such as media studies. They subscribe to the view that if you state, over and over, that “knowledge is socially constructed” or that “any aspect of the world is shaped by class, gender and race” then this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So how did academic vampires become so powerful?įirst of all, academic vampires recognise the power of ritual incantation. The lack of a sense of humour on the part of the proponent, or their inability to explain in words understandable to the man or woman on the street what the field is about, also make it likely that you are dealing with an academic vampire.Īrtist's impression of an Academic Vampire. The presence of the word “and” in a unit title should alert you the possibility that the unit being proposed is a vampire unit. And, if your discipline is still a vampire-free zone, expect the vampire advanced guard to come knocking on your door to convince you that your students majoring in transport logistics need to take a unit in “transport and society” or in “transport cultural identities”. ” genre has probably been infected by the vampire virus. Indeed, any discipline with some version of the “critical studies in. But they are quickly spreading to areas as diverse as law and architecture, terrorism studies and geography. Originally, vampire disciplines found their homes within the humanities and social sciences. These new disciplines are parasitic on existing bodies of knowledge and tend to justify themselves in terms of critique, deconstruction, contextualism, discourse analysis and other approaches that don’t add very much to the total sum of knowledge a society or civilisation possesses about itself. One of the many things ailing the present university – and the list is long – is the emergence of what we might term vampire disciplines.
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