Critical scholarship and intellectual dissent are currently being closed down in favour of a model of academic life that accords scholars a limited role as purveyors of practically useful skills in ‘real-world’ labour markets.
A conversation with Kitty Kelly Epstein, winner of the 2013 Marilyn Gittell Activist Scholar Award and a university professor who took a four-year break from teaching to live her research.
All criticism of the genre notwithstanding, textbooks do have a central role to play in turning sociology students into sociologists. Sometimes I do wonder, however, whether it is time to re-invent the textbook.
When the customs agent started to smile, I knew that things would go badly indeed. He told me that my books would not be allowed into the country, unless I paid a fine of 50 per cent of their current price (a lot of money, and more than I could possibly afford).
The extent to which academics in different situations own their time appears to be closely associated with the distribution of privilege. In an academic world that is elitist one needs to acquire privileges in order to have time.
Many sociology departments teach along conventionalist, Eurocentric lines. Nonetheless, a reformulation of the scope of the sociological curriculum seems to be slowly taking shape.
Currently, textbooks exist at the margins of the Sociology, summarising and recycling extant knowledge while fundamentally lacking in original contributions to sociological enquiry. This doesn’t have to be.
Textbooks now play a crucial role in teaching in the social sciences. Their importance is mirrored by their abundance; there is an enormous variety of textbooks on the most commonly taught subjects. The rise of the ‘textbook industry’ is not necessarily a good thing, though.
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