Once we review the recent attempts at doctoral reforms, it’s difficult not to be discouraged. The defects of doctoral education have remained constant and have resisted any number of solutions. Given the lack of communication among all those concerned with graduate school (including the...
What we offer here is a still preliminary and provisional sketch of some ways of conceptualizing the field beyond the parameters of hyperinclusivity and hypercanonicity.
“What does knowledge do?” exposes our impoverished vocabulary for discussing how what appears political inside of a particular interpretation generates political change in the broader world. What if we took these expressions literally? What if discourse is a thing whose unfoldings we can modulate both through its meanings and through its materiality? Answering these questions requires a more strenuous examination of what we mean by the material, of how meaning matters.
Stanford Humanities Center
