There are a lot of things you need to know to get yourself through university, like how to study when your roommate insists on blasting the latest Rhianna single at full volume in your ear, or how to do the crossword during your history tutorial while looking like you’re really digging the inadequacies of the Schlieffen plan.
But for us arts and science students, the most important skill to master is how to talk the talk. Each discipline is different, but a common feature of all subjects is how they harbor a sticky kind of jargon, a stable team of go-to words and phrases that slither into fifty to sixty per cent of all observations made in every class.
These token terms are the kind of oft-repeated, trite, simplifying, roll-your-eyes-amusing, roll-youreyes- the-other-way-obnoxious, and always well-trodden phrases that thanks to countless repetitions, have lost all meaning. But they’re apparently necessary when describing the academic discipline you’ve chosen, and that’s important becaues what you study may or may not land you a paying job. Probably not.
My advice is to consult the field you’re now bound to, and to pay attention to the singlespeak exchanged there. Learn it, become well-versed in it, and quote it in your essays and final exams. You’ll need to keep these words in your scholarly back-pocket, and pull them out every time your essay-writing hits a snag, or when you find you’ve lost your train of thought in the middle of what you thought was a trailblazing rant in your tutorial.
Some illustrative examples might help you understand the nature of jargon awareness. Consider some of the shtick that crops up in my own major, Women and Gender Studies. The green WGS student will quickly bloom after an encounter with the term “intersectionality”, necessary to describe the thorns of identity politics, and will mature by making acquaintance with “subject position”, “subjectivity”, “agency”, “historicity”, “reflexivity”, “intertextuality”, “stand-point”, and “privilege”, all while pondering the interlocking nature of dominant master narratives and normative assumptions.
Students will become wise by stringing together an indefinite chain of factors following from gender, as in “gender plus race plus class plus sexual orientation plus some differentiation of your choice plus another identity factor that rhymes with orange”, and this all equals a poststructural, third (or fourth?) wave understanding of post-modernity as it relates to an interpolation of Foucault’s understanding of power and hegemony. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Just don’t ask me what it means.
And so, as we embark on an eightmonth campaign of scholarly academic guerilla warfare, let’s review some of our ammunition:”discourse” is a wonderful designation for the way things are talked about. “Postmodern” is a term which no one can really define (how post-modern), making its use flexible and abundant. “Dialectic” is something to do with how things relate to one another. “Problematize” is a powerverb conjugated out of the adjective “problematic” and invites vague intellectual scrutiny to bear upon anything, anything at all. It also rhymes nicely with “contextualize.”
The university student may also want to think about “otherness”, “hegemony”, and about the different combinations of “geo” plus “political” and/or “spatial”. Also consider the ramifications of globalization, globalism, globality, and globalescence. If a word is really authentic, it will register both an approving nod from your impressed fellow students and a bad-ass red line from your spell-check. Prepare to recycle, reuse and then reuse yet again, all for the sake of entering the club of great minds and great futures, and all in service of that other ubiquitous and over-circulated university term, the good ol’ “four-point-oh.”
