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On the Politics of Theorizing in a Postmodern Academy
Author(s) -
DOWNEY GARY LEE,
ROGERS JUAN D.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1995.97.2.02a00060
Subject(s) - postmodernism , sociology , technoscience , relativism , politics , criticism , legitimacy , feminism , egalitarianism , epistemology , nihilism , essentialism , power (physics) , social science , aesthetics , gender studies , law , political science , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The authors outline a politics of academic theorizing that seeks pluralism and egalitarianism without relativism and nihilism. Their goal is to help transform the academy by knocking down the walls around institutionalized technoscience without dissolving the enterprise of academic theorizing. Postmodernist critiques have blurred the cultural boundaries between technoscience and popular science practices, calling into question the absolute legitimacy of the former. Yet the positive proposals of postmodernism have been less valuable than the critiques. The authors hope to recover some of the imaginative power of postmodernist criticism by formulating a different politics of academic theorizing, built around the language and practice of “partnering.” In the process, they hope to build exchange relations between postmodernism and other forms of theorizing, such as feminism.