By David L. Szanton
The usefulness and political implications of region stories courses are at the moment debated in the Academy and the management, the place they can be taken care of as one homogenous and stagnant area of scholarship. The essays during this quantity record a number of the fields' targeted personality and inner heterogeneity in addition to the dynamism due to their evolving engagements with funders, US and foreign politics, and family constituencies. The authors have been selected for his or her long-standing curiosity within the highbrow evolution in their fields. They describe the origins and histories of US-based quarter reviews courses, highlighting their complicated, generative, and occasionally contentious relationships with the social technology and arts disciplines and their diversified contributions to the areas of the area with which they're involved.
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Additional resources for The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Global, Area, & International Archive)
Example text
4 The assessment was not a positive one. ” He gave a list of major political developments in the region that scholars had failed to interpret or foresee, and devoted the rest of the article to listing possible reasons for these failures. Such acknowledgments of failure have been a regular feature of Middle Eastern area studies. Almost a quarter of a century earlier, in August 1973, the Research and Training Committee of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) convened a conference in Palo Alto, funded by the Ford Foundation, to assess the state of the field.
What they could not easily allow was controversy among themselves, or the airing of “sensitive” issues that might produce such controversy. Controversy would perhaps reveal the precarious nature of their detachment. It would undermine the ability of scholars to speak with a single voice, from a singular position, as the authority of science and professional expertise required. 54 As a consequence, Middle Eastern studies tended to avoid the scholarly analysis of Israel and the issue of Palestinian rights.
The inability of culture, the state, the economy, or society to survive as distinct territories of social scientific investigation -- what one might call the deterritorialization of the disciplines-reflected another, related deterritorialization, that of contemporary global history. The confidence of the postwar period that cultures, economies, and social and political systems could each be the object of a separate social science represented an unexamined confidence in the total, self-enclosed, geographically fixed form of the nation-state as the assumed space of all social scientific inquiry.
