Reading Bourdieu: Questions About Engaged Scholarship

Before going to grad school, I worked at MIT as the Service Learning Coordinator. Basically my job was to set up relationships between MIT instructors and community organizations or NGOs for collaborative projects in which students could work for the community organization as part of their coursework. Much of this involved engineering or design classes, for instance in one class students worked with an NGO developing designs for de-mining technologies. There are many criticisms of "service learning” (which certainly can go under many names), and I was always aware that this work can lead to a paternalistic attitude towards "helping" others or to a general self-congratulatory consciousness. Yet on the whole, I believed the benefits of this pedagogy, when done well, far outweighs its harms. In my past two media literacy classes, I have incorporated community learning (a more preferable term perhaps) projects into my own class.

This is just background to get at a problem I've been trying to make sense out of since entering university life again as a student. I have been quite surprised at how much resistance there is to notions of engaged/public/activist scholarship among left-leaning academics. Now it’s probably true that much more of what I've noticed is lack of interest and initiative for changing the kinds of routines you get used to in the professional life of an academic (I certainly know this inertia personally). But beyond these habits of practice, I've heard many arguments about why aspirations for more direct scholarly interventions into political or social arenas outside the university are a bad idea. At first, I was admittedly dismissive of many of these lines of thoughts. But now I realize that there are serious questions and problems to consider here, and that not all of the resistance to changing academic routines can be disregarded as prophylactic defensiveness.

I'd say there are two main poles to the objections toward engaged scholarship - one is that is it is a danger to communities outside of the university (i.e. academic meddlers will try to assert rule as philosopher-kings), the other is that it will degrade scholarly integrity itself. It's the latter objection I want to focus on here, particularly through looking at Pierre Bourdieu's warnings about the pernicious effects of journalistic celebrity on academics in On Television.

The kind of engaged scholarship that Bourdieu approaches with caution, though certainly not total refusal, is academics working with popular media. Bourdieu's main concern is that when academics become to intertwined with journalists, what he calls the "journalistic field" starts to gain undo influence over academic/scientific fields. Without getting into detail about Bourdieu's complicated but suggestive analysis of fields, he is worried that journalism is much less autonomous from market forces than academic fields. From Bourdieu’s perspective, Journalists are in a strange social position. What they do wields enormous influence over the rest of society, yet they have relatively little control as individuals or even as a professional collective over the rules that journalism must conform to. Journalists' work, especially since the dominance of television news, is more beholden to the judgment of audience ratings and the advertising market than to the judgments of their peers. This is what makes journalism less autonomous than entomology, let's say, as a field in which professional entomologists act as the primary judges of the merits of each others' work.
In a nutshell, Bourdieu is worried that working with journalists will make academics conform more to journalistic expectations and this could take precedence over their own professional prerogatives. Being in the U.S. and not at an Ivy league school, the world of public French intellectuals that Bourdieu describes seems a bit remote to me. Yet I take his analysis as a good warning about what could go wrong if there were to be an increase in prominent public intellectuals here.

The counterpoint that Bourdieu seems to miss is that feedback from broader publics could actually make for more sensitive academic work, work that is even more rigorous in a certain way as is forced to respond to a wider array of criticism. If history tells us anything, insular groups of professionals studying society, ethics, politics, etc., miss a lot due to their homogeneity. Think of all the ways that considerations of race and gender throughout the history of every discipline were neglected or mostly reflected the narrow perspectives of restricted memberships groups admitted the professional field. While one solution is of course to diversify the groups recruited into each academic field, I think Bourdieu would be one of the thinkers most cognizant of limits to this approach even under the most ideal conditions. There are always going to be certain "ways of knowing" that will never be able to fully incorporated into the professional norms of academic thought. Nonetheless, academics may be able to encounter and react to these foreign ways of knowing in productive ways.

The problem is that journalism may not always provide a good space for such encounters or the kind of feedback from excluded knowledges that would be most humbling and ultimately most beneficial for academics. I agree with Bourdieu that under many conditions the circulation of ideas in certain journalistic spheres may only provide very limited forms of market-driven feedback from journalistic publics. However, I still have hope that many "alternative" forums from blogs to lefty magazines to journalistic forums yet-to-come can provide space for ideas to circulate among academics and larger publics without everything being reduced to market logic.

While I can't find the passage now, somewhere in On Television I recall Bourdieu fantasizing about academics working collectively to negotiate the conditions of their entry into the journalistic field. I understand how greatly difficult this might be to achieve, but I think there are some rather realistic steps that could be taken (many of these already happening):

1) Academics could seek to work with journalistic outlets that offer them more favorable conditions for expressing their views. Maybe academics need to work on building more relationships with the broad variety of the alternative presses instead of being so fixated on the prestige press, i.e. New York Times, or the most popular outlets, i.e. broadcast news, Time, etc. (Again, I realize this is already the case for many engaged academics, yet this tactic does not come to the forefront enough in at least the discussions I’ve witnessed concerning engaged scholarship).

2) Academics and other groups could try to work with the mainstream journalistic organizations to make some relatively simple structural changes. For instance, maybe people interviewed in stories could be offered special prominent spaces to comment on the stories publicly on their websites.

3) Academics can help create new forums for thoughtful analysis and discussion. The few sites I know in which humanities scholars have created such forums are Bad Subjects, Flow, and the public sociological magazine Contexts. If anyone’s reading this, please let me know of others!