I learned something yesterday. I learned that I'm grateful that I graduated from university in 1986 - not including my year in Geneva for post-graduate studies, which was more important to me as a personal experience than as an academic one. I also learned a new word: positionality. I'm pretty sure that word did not exist 38 years ago, or if it did, it was rarely mentioned. And it has nothing to do with sex.
This new word (to me) "positionality" was used by a Teaching Assistant (TA) marking my daughter's assignment for a first year university course on the Holocaust. In brief, my daughter was given 700-800 words (roughly two to three pages) to review a three-page excerpt from an essay by a group of historians writing about the memoir of a Czech Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the US after the war. The memoir was published in the early 1970s, making it one of the first memoirs of its kind to be published. Until the late 1960s and early 1970s there was little appetite for discussing the Holocaust, and virtually no readership for the writings of survivors, either in the general public, or in the academic community. The notion of a Holocaust memoir - a familiar literary genre today - did not exist to that point in time.
The tide started to turn with the widely publicized Eichmann trial in 1961. By that time, the generation of Holocaust survivors, fifteen years after the end of the war, had had enough time to re-start their lives, and to begin reflecting on their experiences. The televised Eichmann trial demonstrated that the major perpetrators were still being brought to justice and held to account for their crimes, and that successful prosecution required the testimony and eye-witness accounts of survivors. There was also the sense, among the many survivors who had the courage and fortitude to build new lives, that recounting their wartime experiences could serve as a warning for future generations. In the 1960s, the first courses in 'Holocaust Studies' started being offered, and not just as an adjunct to other fields of study such as history, political science or sociology, but as their own area of study. This generated in academia a demand for primary source publication. A wider public interest in Holocaust memoirs developed, especially with the airing of the 4-part television mini-series called "Holocaust" in 1978 in the US.
The assignment given my daughter was to 'analyze' a three-page excerpt of an academic review of an early memoir of a survivor of the Thereisenstadt ghetto who was later deported to Auschwitz and eventually emigrated to New York to re-build her life. It's a truly courageous story, significant for the mere fact that it was one of the earliest memoirs, but also because it provides critical information to academics interested in establishing factuality of this tragic historical event, and to give future generations a detailed sense of what the horrible conditions were actually like.
My daughter made these points in her allottted 800 words. The TA grading her essay commented that although good, the essay did not adequately provide the author's 'positionality' with regards to Czechoslovakian Jews, situating her experience before the war and her later experiences as an emigre to the US. Remember, the assignment was not asking her to read the memoir, nor did it ask her do additional research on, for example, what life was like for the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia before the war, or even how Thereisenstadt was established and the purpose it served for the Nazis etc. All interesting subjects to be sure. And the excerpts she read provided no reflection of the author (except as a cautionary tale for future generations) about why she decided to publish her experiences. Anything said about that would be pure speculation. I immediately understood that the TA wasn't clear on her own assignment, or just expected more than was reasonable from the parameters provided.
But it was the use of that word 'positionality' that really set me off. Group Speak, I thought, made-up jargon - academics love making up lingo. I looked it up, and the term exists. According to Wikipedia:
"A positionality statement, also called reflexivity statement or identity statement, is a statement wherein a person (such as a researcher or teacher) reports and discusses their group identities, such as in a grant proposal or journal submission. They have become commonplace in certain fields of social science, especially within the United States. Positionality statements focus on an "author's racial, gender, class, or other self-identifications, experiences, and privileges", based on the idea that the author's identity can, intentionally or not, influence the results of their research."
Ah, so 'positionality' is a byword for 'privilege'. Fuck her and her damn Marxism, was my first response to the TA's comment.
My second response was, does it actually matter to anyone, least of all the author of a Holocaust memoir, what her 'positionality' is - except of course that she was a Jew born in Europe at possibly the worst time in history to be that? As for the historian's 'positionality' who analyzes a Holocaust memoir, are we supposed to make something significant of that? Is determining 'positionality' supposed to teach us anything about a memoir? Have academics lost their minds? The TA was explicit that my daughter had (unfortunately) treated the assignment as a 'literary' exercise. She apparently did not do enough to pick at the scant textual bones she was offered using ill-conceived academic tools to drain the marrow out of them. My daughter's reaction was frustration, because this is the TA who will be grading her final exam, and fear.
I certainly get the fear.
6 comments:
Yes academics like to fabricate terms to contribute to a discourse. The problem is that those words have the effect of — or are actually meant to obscure not clarify. “Positionality” is an example of that impulse. It stinks IMO because it is cover for mediocrity.
The chances that this TA simply does not know what to say in response to the essay is more than likely. So then insisting on a declaration of the author’s character, represented by a proxy description of background, personal information, is a way for a mediocre scholar to get by and appear to be making a contribution to the research.
The farmer and the shop owner each have disciplinary languages too, but they tend to try to communicate something as a social obligation and with good will at heart.
Here is Jukka Savolainen (Sociology Prof.):
“A defining purpose of the scientific method is to ensure impartial treatment of knowledge claims. To the extent we are able to make progress, it happens as a result of open and honest competition of ideas, evaluated against empirical evidence. It matters not what you think and why you may think that way; the only thing that matters is whether the best available data agrees with your assumptions.”
Positionality statements have little to do with creating or uncovering knowledge — a noble pursuit.
Thanks for this insight. My daughter mentioned to me yesterday that she asked another student whose essay was graded by the same TA about the comment that she received on her essay and it turns out it was very similar to my daughter's, referring to positionality. It seems that when something is conceptually (terminologically) in fashion in academia it becomes the lens through everthing is viewed and evaluated - which, of course, is the very antithesis of dispassionate, disinterested inquiry in effort to add to knowledge through empirical evidence to achieve greater understanding. To put it more bluntly, a coherent fact-based argument, regardless of who makes it, should stand on its own. The exercise of public self-flagellation before the granting patrons represented by positionality statements, seems akin to the medieval artists who decorated churches pledging their undying faith in Christ before their Church patrons. Whatever happened to Galileo as the model of the pursuit of truth?
I recognize the need for understanding where biases may interfere with the pursuit of knowledge, but 'positionality' is not a key, it is a lock. A University department that prioritizes such concepts in fact or in theory is simply lost, beholden to administrators in my opinion, rather than truth and knowledge. There is an aspect of dutiful compliance at play. The opposite of bravery.
People are biased. It's baked into everything we do. It's kind of what makes us human, n'est ce pas? The only question is whether we are biased in interesting and creative ways. At least that's the way it is in the arts (and I'd say the social sciences, which is more social than science). The methodology of hard science is designed precisely to take the 'human' out of the equation (via measurement technology, mathematics etc.) Okay yeah, the social sciences use statistics, but then there's that nasty problem of interpreting the data (not to mention the problematic biases of methodology inherent in the collection process). In the social sciences, all we have is the argument - it either makes logical, coherent sense and can stand up to scrutiny or doesn't. Actually it's often our bias (our cultural upbringing and personal and collective experiences) that gives us a unique point of view and insight. So this business of 'positionality' is not about 'unbiased' pursuit of knowledge, it's really just about institutional dogma by those who stand in judgment of what is 'acceptable' to them. It's political, self-protective and self-preserving. If you don't conform, you're out of the club. No different than accusing someone of being a racist even before they open their mouth. I think we're saying exactly the same thing, just you did it more succinctly and elegantly. LOL
This reminds me of another word that my daughter taught me when she was getting her Masters in Social Work. Her word was "intersectionality". These words, all coined by academics with an agenda of some type, are examples of Orwellian "newspeak". They are the opposite of poetry.
Exactly. The enemy of creativity, originality and freedom of thought - all prerequisites for the pursuit of knowledge.
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