Nice thread on the public misconception of some quarters of critical scholarship.
Now, as for jargon. Thing is, the paper isn't that hard *for me* to read, and I'm reasonably close to the target audience.
The journal, Progress in Human Geography, is intended for scholars who are fluent in the idiom of critical theory; the shorthand by which we communicate ideas that might be too abstract or complex to convey in everyday language.
We might compare it with the jargon used in the natural sciences, which makes even 'introductory' textbooks like this one utterly inaccessible to outsiders. ![]()
the motion of an object, given any force F on the object. And specific classical forces
have been discovered, such as gravity with F=GNmM=r2 and Coulomb’s law with F=
KqQ=r2, etc. In quantum theory there is an analogous structure. The Schrödinger equation, H =
i@ =@t, is like F=ma. It holds for any Hamiltonian." And so on, and so forth." src="/images/1px.png" data-src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpbVlsEWwAIfOVn.jpg">
the motion of an object, given any force F on the object. And specific classical forceshave been discovered, such as gravity with F=GNmM=r2 and Coulomb’s law with F=
KqQ=r2, etc. In quantum theory there is an analogous structure. The Schrödinger equation, H =
i@ =@t, is like F=ma. It holds for any Hamiltonian." And so on, and so forth." src="/images/1px.png" data-src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpbVlsEWwAIfOVn.jpg">
That's from Kane's 'Modern Elementary Particle Physics', which I picked up today in excitement and almost immediately put down again.
I haven't done any degree-level Physics, so I can't read Kane. That's not Kane's fault, right? I'm not the target audience.
Some people assume they should be able to read Humanities scholarship easily, and when they can't, they accuse us of being obscurantist.
(Of course it's true that a lot of academic writing in the humanities AND the natural sciences is stylistically poor, but that's not quite the issue here.)
