Academic Discourse

ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Discourse Communities

Event Initiated Information

The Publication Cycle

Think your professor is biased? Well of course she is! So are you. We live in the world, and those who are capable of total disassociation from that reality are...well...usually on very heavy psychoactive medications in supervised care institutions.

When scholars and researchers initiate research out of a curiosity about why things work the way they do, the cycle works as you saw it in the last few pages. However, when events drive the exchange, the cycle is very different. In that case, scholarly publications are differed until clear patterns occur and subjectivity is less overwhelming and biasing. In essence, we can't talk about what books are likely to pass the test of time and become classics for about a generation. And, history is best judged well after the fact. Before that, what we tend to find is propaganda.

It has been suggested that we as scholars have difficulty being objective about lived events, contemporary works of art, and other things that actually impact our own lives strongly for a full scholarly generation, and sometimes longer. That is not surprising. We are, after all, human; we have a stake in the history we are living. It is important to keep those realities in mind when reading scholarly materials that cover such events, as the researcher can become blind to the bias inherent in sharing space with the research subject.

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