SHiRaB

Welcome to Shirab!

Here’s what’s going on.  Recently I have made a fairly serious shift in my academic study, and at this point I am not entirely sure where it will lead me.  Indeed, while it’s possible it will take me new places academically, it also may represent a final episode in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at a doctorate.  As the new direction is fairly interesting, I hope the former will be the case.  But the road so far has been rocky, and the problems I’ve been having were due at least in part to frustrations in communication.  So I’m doing something I’ve so far been reluctant to do — conducting a part of my process in public.  Briefly, I’m writing both as an exercise and with hope that there are people who will find these pages engaging enough to motivate some interesting conversations.

I’ll use the title of the site as a guide to a few more details on what I envisage will be happening here.  The word Širab (pronounced “SHE-rahb”, anglicized as Shirab) originated in an ex-Yugoslav migrant microculture in late 1990s Brooklyn, and the way we’ve been using it drives some of the attitude with which I’m approaching the blog.  While the details of the etymology and meaning are a story of their own, I am here shamelessly repurposing Shirab to mean Scientific Hissy Radical Blog.  What’s that all about?  Let’s start in the middle.

Hissy means that, at least in part, I am writing in order to avoid temper tantrums.  In part.  More broadly, writing for eventual scholarly publication leaves a number of lacunae, things usually unsaid because they don’t pass muster academically but which feel too valuable to chuck away.  These include, first of all, all the stages of writing between what is sufficient for a class project and what is required for publication.  I have found that the structure of the doctoral program has precious few spaces with a zone of proximal development that can help one navigate this gap.  Usually, such a zone is supposed to exist between a candidate and her/his committee members, but with tight schedules and specialized research topics I have found the distance that I have to cover by myself before I can benefit from those exchanges pretty large.  So I’ll write about what this process is like.

One pursuit in particular I find both essential and distracting is asking questions about the wider context.  What are the conceptual, practical, and ethical blind spots of a particular research approach?  What kinds of complementary insights could be gained from other paradigms, even ones considered so incompatible to be mentionable only as scarecrows?  What kind of practical uses is a research program likely to inform, and so what are its social and political implications?  These questions are perhaps more commonly asked by people just starting a graduate program — I know I’ve asked them then — and while after a number of years in the system I have gained some appreciation why insisting too hard on them may not always be the best use of my time, they have not disappeared.  Some have persisted and developed, others have condensed out of fragments of older ones, and it seems like a good moment to articulate them.  Hopefully a few will turn into conversations that can lead somewhere new.

One good reason why scrutinizing the context isn’t always the best use of one’s scholarly energies is that it can lead into areas that have been well trodden in previous work.  This is good news as it means others have tackled the same issues; the bad news is that getting into existing work sufficiently deeply to even identify terms whereby an answer may be formulated can take months.  Here I must admit I have a personal problem.  I have spent 11 years outside academia before entering grad school, and during this time I have engaged with many subjects of study, but mostly through listening, conversation, and debate rather than directed reading of primary sources.  This has served me very well early in grad school, as I know enough about disparate subjects to come off as quite well informed and well rounded in conversation and class discussion.  But concentrated reading and writing are not my forte, and my in-depth knowledge of many areas certainly doesn’t match either the confidence with which I can discuss them or the impression I often leave when I do.

Still, the experience of talking and thinking in the wild has been very positive and intellectually stimulating, indeed often more so than much communication I have had in my “real” academic work.  In the process, I have stumbled upon a number of ideas I’m pretty attached to, although their present level of formulation is probably somewhere between inspired and crackpot.  They are underdeveloped, some certainly bunk, others likely common missteps of a non-expert, yet others may be promising.  As I will may never get the chance to sort these out and refine the better ones up to a publishable standard, I would like to articulate and document them out in the open, in part to see what others think about them, in part to help myself stop thinking about them for now to better focus on degree work.  The blog is under Creative Commons- Attribution- Share Alike, so anyone interested in commenting, engaging, developing, debunking, or running away with anything they read here is more than welcome to it.

This means that, in these pages, I will shoot above my grade.  I will write about topics I am barely academically qualified in, on the strength of having debated them and thought about them.  This has pitfalls.  However, due to my current obligations there aren’t many opportunities to pursue this activity in person, and more importantly the time seems ripe, so I’ll just live with the risk of coming off as naive, facile, stubborn, or rash.  I invite and welcome feedback and discussion, and I know very well I will now and again eat my words or change my mind between posts.  When this happens, I will note it and move on.

Scientific means that I ultimately do believe we can and should seek and formulate positive reliable statements about the world.  In some quarters these are fighting words, so to moderate them I’ll add that the realm of statements I see as positive and reliable includes many usually put forward by approaches that consider themselves non-positivist or anti-positivist.  Such as: that the ways a certain group makes sense of the world are equally valid even though they are intrinsically marginalized by the dominant perspectives, that some work considered scientific is so molded by social power pressures and historical path dependencies that it needs to be considered untrustworthy, that writing in a given scholarly discipline follows tropes of a literary genre and therefore carries some of the same underlying cultural assumptions, or that in some cases we just can’t tell much reliably and positively at all.

Now, these are fighting words in other quarters.  Philosophy and sociology of science are among those fields in which I will shoot above my grade, so addressing this in any detail is a matter for a separate discussion.  At the moment I will only say that I hold consilience of knowledge to be possible and to an extent desirable, if not always practically attainable.  However, unlike E. O. Wilson, I don’t think consilience proceeds in one direction from the natural sciences to the humanities and arts, but both ways and arguably primarily in the opposite direction.  I’ll leave it at that.

Radical means that I am fully on board with Marx’s quip that the point is not just to understand the world but to change it.  In fact I think that at this point in history it’s practically required — that a degree of exchange between people’s diverse personal experiences, efforts to make sense of large amounts of complex information, and collective action on all levels from communities to the globe, is the best bet for the human race to reach the next century without massive harm to all life on Earth.  Indeed realistically we should be able to consider ourselves lucky, if “lucky” is the right word, if the scale of suffering does not exceed that inflicted by the wars of the first half of the 20th century.  So I will pass judgments, and should I judge harshly I will offer my best arguments why I think it is justified and open it up for discussion.  I will clarify my own political positions in some detail as need arises.

Blog is this medium, enjoy it and try not taking it too seriously.  Thanks for coming!

To be continued…