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If your response to an impassioned plea outlining a scholar's work and its value, when they're at the risk of being imminently sacked, is to start criticising that scholarship, I worry about your priorities.
I mean surely you're aware of the stultifying fear of financial threat this must pose for them? Especially when that scholar has done nothing wrong?
There is a time and place to highlight much needed reforms regarding citation practice and other issues. This isn't it.
There is a time and place to highlight much needed reforms regarding citation practice and other issues. This isn't it.
Also for the scholarship to be doing the things it was doing in 2002 was not common or widely recognised. I say this as someone whose own work has been a historiography of our field from the 1980s to the present.
Have criticisms about the development of the field, ethical citation practice, etc, fine. But this is an impassioned plea about the scholarship of the person about to be made involuntarily redundant HAVING NOTHING WRONG.
Dislike the person tweeting about the scholarship, fine, think their approach is wrong fine. But I don't understand this need to respond like this to someone trying to save a beloved teacher's job.
https://twitter.com/DJMHarland/status/1353279882520887296
I don't mean by this that there wasn't other work doing this, maybe indeed with better frameworks, that was overlooked! I don't mean there weren't omissions or things that could not have been done better! This is always the case!
I don't mean by this that there wasn't other work doing this, maybe indeed with better frameworks, that was overlooked! I don't mean there weren't omissions or things that could not have been done better! This is always the case!
But I find it rich for people who've yet to publish to have these sorts of takes about people who were doing *very* uncommon and, yes, innovative work on important issues (and who are very humble about it) in 2002.
Especially given, and I cannot emphasise this enough, this whole affair concerns trying to save that person and their colleagues from getting the sack!
Should specify that since they submitted they defended in 2002 they were actually *doing* this work in the late 90s. It was even more uncommon then, unless someone can point me to examples of work that was doing this beyond early forays of the Vienna School and Goffart?
(I mean this sincerely, I'm always keen to have the many gaps I have in my knowledge filled and to improve on this)
(The Vienna School obviously also encompasses Geary, Wood, etc)
But I think the point that even if work existed (& I don't know that it does), and was omitted, and maybe shouldn't have been. 1) It certainly was hardly widespread or widely known 2) Would you have done better in the late 1990s with the resources available? *Will* you do better?
PhDs leave out bits of scholarship all the time this doesn't render them un-innovative!
