Description
Book SynopsisIntervenes in the ongoing debates about the changing conditions of higher education in America, with a focus on English studies and the humanities. This study integrates three concerns: the economic restructuring of higher education, the transformation of disciplinary models of teaching and research, and the rise of the academic labor movement.
Trade Review"Both timely and provocative, this compelling book by David B. Downing succeeds in the very difficult task of relating the internal organization and subject matter of an academic field to the sociology of the profession." Marc Bousquet, the founding editor of Workplace: The Journal for Academic Labor "The Knowledge Contract takes up one of the most important topics in the humanities--the university and its current prospects. Its central innovation is its examination of Thomas Kuhn's conception of paradigms. Along the way, Downing takes up current issues facing the university, such as diversity, cosmopolitanism, globalism, and academic labor." Jeffrey Williams, co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Table of Contents1: Working Outside (and Beside) the Knowledge Contract;2: Professions, Disciplines, and Paradigms: Reconstructing Academic Labor within the Nonmodern University; 3: Paradigms Performed and the Kuhnification of the Humanities; Chapter 4: Radical Diversities and the Cosmopolitan Self: The Disciplinary Intellectual Confronts the Multivalent University; 5: Pragmatic Interventions: The Lure of Method and the Rise of Disciplinary Labor; 6: The "Mop-up" Work of Theory Anthologies: Theorizing the Discipline and the Disciplining of Theory; 7: Beside Disciplinary English: Integrating Reading and Writing be Reforming Academic Labor; 8: Imagining Future Users: Visions of Work in the Reconfigured University
