by broken robot » Thu Dec 06, 2012 2:25 am
I don't know, with the experience of being in grad school I can say it has far less to do with the overall field and more to do with individual advisers. If you have good advisers, no matter the field, you will write more clearly.
Moreover, some social science and humanities fields for various institutional reasons might be smaller and thus more prone to insider discourse, but that has nothing to do with the actual validity of the research object. I'd reverse the cause and effect: those fields aren't hermetic because of the writing style or individuals who populate them, which supposedly ends up limiting their broader appeal. The fields are hermetic because the appeal of the object itself is already minimal. Folks within those disciplines may then out of anxiety end up creating a convoluted writing style to assuage their insecurities about lack of importance in the broader society.
It's just a sad fact that given the dominant norms in our society a field such as Gender Studies is just not going to be taken seriously and get the funding, to a large extent regardless of the actual output of that field. Even if writing quality across the board was top notch in that field, the way policy making and consultancy is set up big and powerful organizations such as the World Bank are still going to choose economists, statisticians, and similar sorts of people. I mean, you're just not going to have as wide a scope for advancing US strategic and economic interests for example using vocabularies critical of power, so why bother expanding related fields and providing the resources for better research practices in those disciplines?
The Subversives