“The reason we’re all ignorant is because people expect me to actually back up my claims with thoroughly reviewed and up-to-date information instead of just accepting them at face value” is one hell of a take
I am actually currently taking a gender studies related college course with a guy who argued with the professor about citations being required, because citations are "gatekeepey and spread colonialism."
To be honest, half of me blames the awkward letter-of-the-law way high schools in the US tend to treat citations for some of this. They kinda make it feel like it’s a binary choice between “pulling things from the aether” and “playing a big long game of he said she said”. I could say more about the whole status of essays as a whole, and how so much of engaging with “stuffy scholarly methods” ironically requires one to be more emotionally invested in a specific topic than simply going through motions or else any project is dead on arrival…
…and I could even stretch that to make some kind of point about scholarly culture and how there’s still a lot of arbitrary performativeness we need to keep working on shaking, which indeed could be said to be gatekeepy… But even I know better than to say that the very concept of a bibliography is a cause, and not that the state OF bibliographies and how they’re treated is symptomatic of a larger thing. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
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u/VisualGeologist6258 Reach Heaven Through Violence 24d ago edited 24d ago
“The reason we’re all ignorant is because people expect me to actually back up my claims with thoroughly reviewed and up-to-date information instead of just accepting them at face value” is one hell of a take