Academic Marginalization Research Articles

True encounters with the fictional university: collectively rewriting the script of filmic dark academia from the academic margins

ABSTRACT Portrayals of teachers, students and universities in the popular cultural texts of dark academia are far removed from the lived realities of teaching academics in the contemporary, digital, neoliberal university. Pathways educators, who teach large numbers of non-traditional students in tertiary preparation programmes mostly online, are almost completely silenced in much of popular and academic discourse about the idealised university. This paper disrupts such romanticised representations of academia through personal reflections on four well-known films aligned with dark academia subcultures: Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting, The Riot Club and Mona Lisa Smile. Through their first voice writings, six pathways educators working together at a regional Australian university come together to flip the script on the fantasy academy. From six diverse origin stories, a collective voice emerges, telling a new, co-written story based on our lived experiences of teaching and learning from the underrepresented margins of the neoliberal academy.

America’s Race-Based Caste Structure: Its Impact in College and Professional Sports

Racial inequities in college and professional sports remain prevalent and persistent despite the awareness of such inequities by those with the power to effectuate change. This Article proposes that explanations frequently offered for the slow pace of progress often fail to account for the hierarchy derived from a race-based caste system embedded in American society. Relying on the work of author Isabel Wilkerson, Part II describes major pillars of America’s race-based caste structure. Part III examines how stereotypes of Blacks’ presumed intellectual inferiority and a lack of fitness for leadership roles adversely impact their access to positions of power in both college and professional sports. Part IV discusses how the caste-system hierarchy and its accompanying mindset manifests in the academic marginalization of Black college athletes and the transfer of revenue disproportionately generated by them to predominantly White coaches, athletic administrators, and athletes in non-revenue generating sports. This Article discusses the limited effectiveness of legal doctrine, including anti-discrimination laws and contract law principles, to significantly diminish the above-referenced racial inequities in college and professional sport. In addition, it proposes specific policies that may assist in achieving greater racial equity in sport. It concludes, however, that a necessary step in moving toward greater racial equity in college and professional sports is an honest recognition that systemic racial inequities are, in part, a product of a caste-system mindset.

(Re)Writing Anthropology and Raising Our Voices from the Academic Margins


 In reframing the ontological limits and possibilities of the academic margin, this Colloquy situates the Minority Serving Institution (MSI) classroom as a critical (field) site in which anthropological knowledge is innovated, produced, and contested. The essays, written by anthropologists who work in and represent “non-hegemonic” institutions, speak to decolonial, Black feminist, and liberatory projects and pedagogy that challenge what anthropology can look like, how anthropology can be practiced, how it can be taught, and what it can contribute to a more just world. This collection crafts a vision for an equitable anthropology of the now and the future and situates the academic margins as an important space from which the discipline must be reimagined in the current political moment.

The Margin Speaks: On the Radical Possibilities of Embodied Knowledge as Decolonial Pedagogy

In this essay, I argue for an engagement with students’ embodied knowledge as a means by which to rethink what it means to “do anthropology” as well as produce knowledge. I center auto-ethnography and photovoice as emancipatory teaching strategies that ask students to think about their own lived experiences as knowledge, their own communities as sites of theory making, and their own voices as the authority. This essay takes seriously the classroom at the academic margins as integral to the renewed calls to decolonize anthropology.

Archives at the Margins: Toward a Liberatory Pedagogy in Anthropology

This essay reflects on the academic margins as a space of openness for anthropological teaching and learning. I describe an activity in which students in a medical anthropology course analyzed primary source materials documenting Black health social movements that were curated for the class by a community archive in Los Angeles. Using this example, I explore possibilities for reshaping anthropological teaching toward an engaged, liberatory pedagogy that reconceptualizes knowledge as co-created, centers marginalized voices and experiences, and links theory to justice-oriented social action.

Ideology, Nationalism, and Architecture: Representations of Kurdish Sites in Turkish Art Historiography

This article discusses how the narrative of Turkish national historiography, crafted by Turkish elites in the 1930s in light of the official doctrine of the Turkish History Thesis and the Sun Language Thesis, attempted to Turkify the patronage of historical buildings constructed by diverse ethnic and religious communities of the country’s eastern region. I focus on the architectural production of the seven Kurdish dynasties that ruled a large area in the Middle East from the tenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Kurdish rulers constructed a large number of urban monuments bearing their names. These sites were appropriated into the Turkish national historiography in a denial of their Kurdish origins. This approach to history has rendered Kurdish material culture all but invisible, pushing the understanding of Kurdish architectural patronage and identity to the academic margins. This study aims to develop an alternative approach to the history of urban and architectural production in eastern and south-eastern Turkey, and opens a discussion for a definition of Kurdish art and architecture.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature

Academic colonialism and marginalization: on the contentious postcolonial–decolonial debate in Latin American Studies

ABSTRACT This article offers an overview of key debates that conditioned the reception of postcolonial and subaltern studies among Latin Americanist scholars. It begins by analysing the initial Latin American postcolonial debate, and it assesses the claims of academic colonialism and marginalization that were voiced in the course of the polemic. In particular, it considers how these arguments worked to distance Latin America from the wider, emerging field of postcolonial studies by highlighting the supposed incommensurability of the region’s colonial experience, and it foregrounds important misapprehensions about subaltern studies that conditioned the development of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group. It further traces how these claims paved the way for the emergence of Latin American decolonial scholarship, and it foregrounds key unresolved tensions that have shaped its development. By providing a detailed account of this contentious intellectual history, this article seeks to interrogate the foundations of Latin American decoloniality, and to contribute to a critical reassessment of that project.

How White nationalists mobilize genetics: From genetic ancestry and human biodiversity to counterscience and metapolitics.

Our aim in this study was to understand how genetics ideas are appropriated and mobilized online toward the political projects of White nationalism and the alt right. Studying three different online venues, we investigated how genetics is used to support racial realism, hereditarianism, and racial hierarchy. We analyzed how these ideas are connected to political and metapolitical projects. In addition, we examined the strategies used to build authority for these interpretations. We analyze three online venues in which genetics has been mobilized to advance racial realism and hereditarian explanations of racial differences. These were (a) the use of genetic ancestry tests in online nationalist discussions, (b) blogs and other venues in which the human biodiversity ideas are articulated, (c) activities surrounding the OpenPsych collection of online journals. Ethnographic and interpretive methods were applied to investigate scientific and political meanings of efforts to mobilize genetic ideas. We found that White nationalists use genetic ancestry tests to align White identity with ideas of racial purity and diversity, educating each other about genetics, and debating the boundaries of Whiteness. "Human biodiversity" has been mobilized as a movement to catalog and create hereditarian ideas about racial differences and to distribute them as "red pills" to transform online discourse. The OpenPsych journals have allowed amateur hereditarian psychologists to publish papers, coordinate activity, and legitimate their project at the academic margins. These various appropriations of genetics aim to further racial realism and hereditarian explanations of racial social and behavioral differences. Beyond these substantive aims, on a "metapolitical" level, they serve to reframe concepts and standards for political and scientific discussion of race, challenge structures of academic legitimacy and expertise, and build a cadre of ideological foot soldiers armed with an argumentative toolkit. As professional anthropologists and geneticists aim to accurately communicate their science and its implications for understanding human differences to the public, they must contend with these substantive claims and metapolitical contexts.

“Survival – to keep writing”: An interview with Shirley Geok-lin Lim

In this email interview conducted in 2016, author and scholar Shirley Geok-lin Lim addresses the changing social and political conditions in the United States. Lim discusses the affective relationship between aesthetics and politics in her work, the anxiety of multilingual stylistics, and the in-between nature of the trans-nation. She also reflects on the academic marginalization she has experienced as a result of her immigrant designation and subjectivity, as well as the indirect influence of China and Chineseness on her writing. Commenting on her memoir Among the White Moon Faces, Lim notes the difficulty of titling, and addresses the impact of anglophone literature upon her during her colonial Malaysian upbringing.

Gender and women’s studies: Situated academic marginalization

This paper aims to discuss the situation of Gender and Women?s Studies (GWS) graduate programs within mainstream academia of Turkey with a critical Feminist Standpoint Theory approach from the aspect of situated academic marginalization. Within the scope of the study, I carried out 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews with GWS academics from two distinct universities with similar historical backgrounds yet quite different specificities, and in the light of these interviews, I analyzed whether GWS, as an academic reciprocity of feminist movement, can be thought as a field with a twofold epistemic superiority with regard to ?better accounts of social reality?, as an ?other? of academia or not. In this regard, four main factors influencing GWS directly and deeply are found to be, respectively: socio-political situation which the programs were born into, current political conjuncture of the country, current situation of academia and of feminist movement within the country. In addition to these structural factors, self-definitions and self-valuations of the agents of the programs- from students to academics-, and curricula formed in parallel to the mission and vision the agents adopted appear to be significant factors that situate the programs within academia within the scope of subjects and specificities of the subjects.

Gender and women’s studies: Situated academic marginalization

Gender and women’s studies: Situated academic marginalization

Resistance as Hope: A Review of Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-oppressive Approaches Edited by Leslie Brown and Susan Strega

Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous, and Anti-oppressive Approaches edited by Leslie Brown and Susan Strega (2005) is a research text as well as a book about transformation and hope. In this review I examine more thoroughly the word, resistance, and its relevance to teaching research methods and conducting inquiry from the academic margins.

Gabriele Bammer (ed.): Disciplining interdisciplinarity: integration and implementation sciences for researching complex real-world problems (and the deeper science challenge to co-evolve with complexity)

This book’s major contribution to applying scientific knowledge to address complex problems is timely, as these problems are proliferating due in part to a history of reductive science, and because scientific thinking is changing rapidly. I appreciate the book’s motivating question: BHow can academic research enhance its contribution to addressing widespread poverty, global climate change, organized crime, escalating health care costs or the myriad of other major problems facing human society.^ I support the author’s focus on interdisciplinary thinking and her concern that interdisciplinary research remains at academic margins because it lacks substantial, wellestablished, internationally accepted methodology. I agree with her expressed need for methodological soundness, greater interaction among diverse groups, and managing of unknowns to help realize the potential of interdisciplinary research. The book proposes a framework grounded in theory, relevant research, broad exchange of ideas, and collection and evaluation of methodologies. It makes four arguments: a specific focus is required; research embracing multiple methods constitutes a style called integrative applied research; a new discipline, Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S), can be an effective way to document and transmit integrative applied research concepts and methods; and given that today’s complex problems require urgent attention, the process should be accelerated through a Big Science-type project of the scale and power of the Human Genome Project. The book seeks to propose a structure for the I2S discipline, plant the seed for an I2S Development Drive as a new Big Science-type project to establish I2S, and start a worldwide discussion about I2S and the I2S Development Drive. This review is informed by my 40+-year evolving focus on systems, general systems theory, systems science, complexity science, and design science. In the review that follows, I first discuss each of the book’s four arguments in relation to object-, system-, and meta-levels of systems engagement. Agreeing strongly that today’s complex problems require urgent attention, I then discuss the system-level at which the challenge can best be addressed, as well as the nature and urgency of the challenge, from a complexity science perspective. Argument #1, TAKING A SPECIFIC FOCUS, targets research involving experts from multiple disciplines investigating common complex real-world social and environmental problems. By focusing on problems, this argument engages systems at the objectand system-level, in ways that help practitioners make more integrated and implementationinformed decisions. I see this argument focusing on symptomatic problems of complex systems whose functionality has been degraded, but not the meta-level engagement needed to re-empower complex systems to fully regenerate, co-adapt, and complexify. Argument #2, DEFINING A NEW RESEARCH STYLE; INTEGRATIVE APPLIED RESEARCH, seeks to identify unknowns, embrace multiple types of knowledge, and appreciate diverse methodologies. This focus helps diverse disciplines broaden their perceptions of problems, encourages processes to have methodological flexibility, and helps integrate diverse

Embracing the Academic Margins: An Interview with Eric Anthony Grollman

Embracing the Academic Margins: An Interview with Eric Anthony Grollman

Globoscepticism of classical liberals

In the past few years, after 50 years on academic margins the debate on a world government (or world state) is renewed. Traditionally it is followed by aversion toward world state, nowdays called globoscepticism. The paper focuses on classical liberal thinkers of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their views on a world state, that have been rooted in early federal peace proposals and analyses of modern political thinkers (Rousseau, Bentham, Cobden, Mill, Smith, Mill). The author points out on Kant?s ?federalism of free states?, to show it did not imply support for world state but improved international law. Also, it is confirmed that globoskepticism of the classical British liberals, or their distrust of a world organization, arises from general liberal distrust of a big state political organization. The classical liberal attitude has been abandoned by new liberal internationalists at the beginning of the twentieth century, but classical liberal doctrine continues to have both an academic influence and practical outcomes.

Academic Marginalization? The Journalistic Response to Social Work Research on Native Hawaiian Youths

Mokuau, Garlock-Tuiali'i, and Lee (2008) recently conducted a review of studies that focused on Native Hawaiians and/or other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs) and found a total of 32 articles in 23 social work journals published from 1995 to 2004 on these populations (reflecting 0.64 percent of all reviewed articles). Of these articles, only 15 focused on NHOPIs exclusively, with nine focusing on Native Hawaiians. The purpose of this article is to elucidate these findings by examining and analyzing journalistic response to studies from a research project focused on Native Hawaiian youths. This project funded by a five-year federal grant (K01 DA019884) and focused on environmental and cultural context of drug use for Native Hawaiian youths. To date, study has yielded two data sets (one qualitative and one quantitative) and seven different manuscripts. To supplement findings of Mokuau et al., this article examines comments from external reviewers on manuscripts from project that were rejected for publication. Comments from 13 reviewers or editors from six different journals were included in this analysis. Social work (n = 2), psychology (n = 2), and interdisciplinary (n = 2) journals reviewed and rejected manuscripts from this project over a two-year period (2007 to 2009). Because all of journals used a blind review process, demographic information on external reviewers not available. However, seven of editors from journals were male, and one female. An analysis of narrative critiques made, establishing common themes evolving from reviews. The most common critique (from five journals and seven reviewers or editors) focused on or For example, one editor from a psychology journal rejected a qualitative manuscript on basis of non representativeness of sample. A reviewer from an interdisciplinary journal similarly indicated that another qualitative manuscript was quite limited in its applicability. These studies were based on focus group data from 47 sixth- through eight-grade Native Hawaiian youths in five middle or intermediate schools from two Hawaiian Islands. Manuscripts focused on survey data (N = 249) from project have also met with a similar response. The editor from a top-tier social work journal indicated that reviewed manuscript both well written and interesting ... but focus narrow for [the journal]. As part of justification for rejecting a related manuscript, another editor from a top-tier interdisciplinary journal stated that sample size too small. In some cases, reviewers demanded that manuscripts justify relevance of population. Immediately after a section in a qualitative manuscript on drug and health disparities of Native Hawaiian youths, which intended to demonstrate need for drug use research with population, one reviewer from an interdisciplinary journal asked, Why Hawaiian youth? The reviewer further stated that the author(s) should make a stronger case for why emphasis [is] on this particular youth group/culture. In review of another qualitative manuscript, a reviewer from a social work journal insisted that drug resistance behaviors of Native Hawaiian youths be compared with those of white youths to establish their cultural relevance (even though data on white youths were not collected for this phase of study). One approach to address these types of reviews might be to contextualize population of Native Hawaiians within broader categories of Asian Pacific Islanders and/or indigenous populations, thus increasing generalizability of research. However, this approach reflects an oversimplification of specific issues of different Asian, Pacific Islander, and indigenous groups and is one of research practices that Mokuau et al. (2008) critique in their article. Mokuau et al. …

Collaborative Artmaking for Reducing Marginalization

Research has shown that the study of children’s drawings can shed light on certain problems, allowing many invisible sides of children’s school life to emerge. Based on the results of that research, this article will study whether the use of drawings, and art in general, could lead to the reduction of social and academic marginalization and to the increased participation of children who appeared to be marginalized. This study presents the process of a collaborative artmaking in a pre-primary school class with the purpose of reducing social and academic marginalization and increasing the participation of marginalized children in the curricula, the cultures, and the societies of schools.

Losing the community Trees in the Global Wood: The academic marginalization of local data in Biological Anthropology

Losing the community Trees in the Global Wood: The academic marginalization of local data in Biological Anthropology

American Political Histories

It now seems as if an eon has passed, and not merely a century or so, since the eminent historian Herbert Baxter Adams's seminar room at Johns Hopkins was emblazoned with this motto: “History is past Politics, and Politics present History.” Whereas political history once dominated scholarship on all of American history, professional scholars in recent decades have turned skeptical, and at times hostile, to studies that stress mainstream politics (including parties and government institutions), let alone the lives and achievements of great political leaders and public officials. There has been, to be sure, a great deal written on these topics, as there continues to be today. But after the 1960s, an explosion of interest in other historical modes—social history, cultural history, anthropological history—relegated political history to the academic margins. As a field, political history lost its old sense of excitement, as well as the rewards of every variety that accompanied the excitement (1).