The Very Best of Academic Jargon Meme

[melwil]

I threatened, now here it is.

I have a reading for one of my classes tomorrow. And since you lot on my friends list are rather intelligent, I challenge you to unravel some of the following sentences from the aforementioned reading. Failing that, find some wacky jargon-filled sentences of your own and join the fun!

Multiliteracies: literacy learning and the design of social futures by the New London Group

"An order of discourse is the structured set of conventions associated with semiotic activity (including use of language) in a given social space - a particular society, or even a particular institution such as a school or workplace, or more loosely structured spaces of ordinary life encapsulated in the notion of different lifeworlds."



"Available Designs also include another element; the linguistic and discoursal experience of those involved in Designing, in which one moment of Designing is continuous with and a continuation of particular histories."

"As for orders of discourse, the generative interrelation of discourses in a social context, their constituant genres can be partly characterised in terms of the particular social relations and subject positions they articulate, whereas discourses are particular knowledges (constructions of the world) articulated with particular subject positions."

"The term hybridity highlights the mechanisms of creativity and of culture-as-process as particularly salient in contemporary society."

Comments

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

I'll see if I can find the Lease Memorandum at work tomorrow that the Senior Associate and I want to re-write this year. If we ever have time.

Because that thing is seriously jargony...

(Oh, and I'm working on it. Hopefully you'll get said ficlet before I go to work tomorrow.)

[theravensclaw.livejournal.com]

Scarrilly enough some of that makes sense to me...I actually liked semiotics at uni (the cute lecturer did help) i pity you

[melwil.livejournal.com]

I'm always scared when I read something from a reading like this and it makes sense . . . *g*

[theravensclaw.livejournal.com]

I agree...after enough of it the gibberish gets ingrained in your brain

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I hate "what does this mean?" questions. I know what this means, but putting it in non-jargon is hard, simply because jargon developes in order to express things everyday language isn't quite capable of expressing.

Sentence one - societies, workspaces, or simply the way you live given your background and context and relationships with others, all involve idiosyncratic ways of expressing meaning. Taken as a whole, the sets of meaning and expression and communication of a given context is called an order of discourse - it's just a name for the conventions, knowledge, whatdoyoucallit, that makes understanding in that context legible.

Sentence two - Available Designs incorporates the way in which people involved in Designing use/develop and inherit prexisting orders of discourse.

Sentence three - the difference between discourses and orders of discourse is that discourses are dependednt with subject positions while orders of discourse apply to a wider context with more than one subject, relating to other subjects - the way different discourses interact is part of what creates an order of discourse.

Sentence three - hybridity is ueseful as a term because it draws attention to the fact that culture is continually being created, especially in contemporaray society. (I'd take issue with that second part as it implies non-contempory societies were static, but that's beside the point.)

I don't know if my translations are more or less opaque than the original, but oh, it sounds like a wondermous course.

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually think it was that bad at all... Does that make me hopelessly ivory tower? But then, I adored Anthropology, Women's Studies and Post-structuralism so it's all very familiar. Semiotics needs its own vocabulary, because it's so very, very reflexive about language itself as a semiotic practice.

I'm kind of jealous of melwil. Librarianship looks fun, but not really intellectually challenging or exciting. I miss courses that meant really stretching myself.

[melwil.livejournal.com]

You know what . . . it's beginning to make sense!! I sometimes think that academics just use the longer words and more convoluted sentences to look like academics. This happened later in the article when they spent two pages explaining that shopping malls use different literacy elaments (such as text, architectural designs, music, pictures etc) to create a place you don't want to leave.

Which introduces a whole new conversation on language and its applications in certain environments.

I liked ancient history better. Most of our jargon had dirty Aristophanic jokes attached *g*

[melwil.livejournal.com]

This is very strange to me because the Ancient History and History departments were much clearer in their writing. Philosophy was a stretch, but mostly in the brain work required rather than the language, and US politics was just pure joy for me.

Also, when we covered this last year (I swear this year is just one big revision course) our teacher did a rather muddled job of explaining the various teaching theories, let alone how they fit together. Luckily this year's lecturer is more than capable and she's also our tutor.

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

I'm very glad if it helped... my attempts at translating look far more horribly confused to me than the original!

I sometimes think that academics just use the longer words and more convoluted sentences to look like academics.

There's a possibly apocryphal story about Judith Butler, she of Gender Trouble fame, involving another professor at one of her lectures standing up and asking her if she was deliberately preventing three quarters of her audience from understanding her. Turns out, she was. (And her ideas are marvellous, but her work is bloody unreadable.)

[kannaophelia.livejournal.com]

~nod~ They'd be very different, I think... the reason I listed the subjects I did was that similar theories and terms were used in them all, so I'm used to working with this particular set of words and ideas. I love it - believe it or not, reading that over gave me a genuine buzz. Somewhere in the mess that was my PhD thesis I lost the excitement this kind of thing used to give me. I think it's coming back, whcih means I'm recovering emotionally and mentally.

Political sociology, on the other hand, I hated and was useless at, and I have a fair idea *you* would be brilliant. I don't want all this to sound like I think what can be vaguely described as post-structuralist theories are more intellectual in some way than, say, Ancient Greek History, just that they are *different*. And one notorious for being jargon ridden. ~grin~ You get so used to it you hardly notice, although I did always try, honest, to use simple language whenever possible myself.

[melwil.livejournal.com]

I still think I'd prefer difficult to understand lecturers compared to our Phys Ed lecturer who referred to a woman with short hair as 'sir' . . . (I really, really hate that class)

Some of the Greek Philosophy I read in my undergrad was near impossible - most of the time due to poor translations. So I'd have to hunt down the original Greek, study the word and then try to comprehend the ideas - a lot of very satisfying work.

[melwil.livejournal.com]

I think Ancient History does have a 'language', but I think it has its roots in older languages (Latin and Greek, of course, but also a lot of the best Ancient History works are fairly old). The other subjects are always changing, with new ideas, and therefore new words to describe those ideas, being added constantly. I think I would enjoy the changes if I was constantly in it rather than just popping by for a visit and trying to work out how to apply the words to a year 4 classroom.

I remember once I began learning Greek, my assignments in Greek history became a lot deeper, because on top of the history ideas, there were whole ideas about the language and why particular ancient historians chose to use particular words.

Language really is fascinating when you get into it, isn't it *g*

[sangerin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't find the bits that melwil posted to be all that bad. (But I've grown wary lately of saying that I understand academic prose because it is apparently a Bad Thing).

The Lease Memorandum, though? Uses fifty words where it could use five, and is truly awful, partially because documents that are being signed by people other than lawyers should be able to be understood by people other than lawyers.