Modalities of Academic Writing and the Immigrant Scholar

There is the conventional language of social sciences, style and content striving to produce solid descriptions, a linear narrative to illustrate relations, establish causality, anchor conclusions; a piece of writing expected to produce the effect of an objective rendition of a social phenomenon.

There is a mode of theoretical language in the humanities (among several iterations) rich yet dense, illuminating yet sometimes difficult to access, (re)produced by academics with high cultural capital, demanding deep erudition, incredible dedication and toil, the making of foundations that take years to give shape, addressing a community of insiders, not rarely exhausting outsiders striving to grapple with its incredible analytical depths.

There is the language too of scholarship as reflexive narrative, guided by the ethos of translating difficult concepts into a language an educated person could understand. Translating given modalities of writing with the aspiration to assert something freshly. A language in which emotion and knowledge converge to produce flowing accounts crafted to move readers; to evoke complexity, acknowledge limits, identify potentialities.

Other modalities between and beyond abound––the above does not attempt a typology.

I imagine an immigrant junior scholar entering this field, the vast labor demanded, the exhausting navigation of the various writing modalities; the various translations (from one language to another, from one modality of writing to another) required, depending on departmental expectations and mandates. An experience indelibly imprinted in the soul and mind, an embodied companion throughout one’s academic journey.

I think about (and live) the project of making a choice––of aspiring to a particular choice––in the direction of crafting a voice within the structural pressures of limited resources, the realities of the academic market, other institutional demands, one’s politics of knowledge…

I often think of (and have been living through) this kind of an immigrant’s scholarly journey; in relation to the degrees of imported cultural and linguistic capital one embodies, the difference that the resources this person carries will make in negotiating all sorts of academic rites of passage in the new environment; how extraordinarily challenging this journey is, how fulfilling and rewarding, how fundamentally class-inflected this experience could be…

Yiorgos Anagnostou

September 26, 2024