Constructing academic knowledge
Alex Reid,
Digital Digs,
May 04, 2012
There's so much wrong with the expression 'knowledge construction' in my mind that it's diffcult to know where to start with the criticism. Alex Reid helps, though. He comments, "Levi Bryant has a great post on the problem with the term "construction." I think his point echoes those that Latour has been making for some time. We start with the presumed nature/culture divide of the modern world, but one that is continually unmade in issues ranging from gender, race and sexuality to environment and economics."
That's a good criticism, but he follows up later with, "What constructing ought to denote, but perhaps never will (hence Levi and Latour's calls for a new term), is that the knowledge we produce is another object in the world, made from other objects in the world (including us)." Which isn't really right; as I was commenting in an interview today, knowledge isn't an object, it's a property of an object (and specifically, a cognitively sophtsticated object, like a human). We shouldn't say "Jane has knowledge." We should say "Jane knows."
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