...like too many academics, [members of genetic genealogy mailing lists in the mid-2000s] seemed to have adopted disciplinary chauvinism on behalf of human-population genetics. The "gene fetishism" thread was lively and involved multiple active, technically knowledgeable listers. With one memorable exception, those who commented at length on the gene-fetishism topic were sure that social-scientific specialty language was simply without intellectual merit. Its use, therefore, was seen as showing a lack of moral integrity. Why was it acceptable for genomics in and of itself to be complex, but theories about the interplay between several additional complicated realms â genomics and political and cultural economies â must be easy for everyone to understand?
Kim TallBear (2013: 122), from Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science
the question of exclusivity/technicality is very important to what I want to do with academia in future, namely to work to make my and others' academic work accessible beyond the ivory tower. on the one hand, TallBear is right: the fact that the humanities and social sciences have developed their own technical vocabularies to discuss the complicated issues they engage with is no different from the fact that the sciences have specialized technical vocabularies. the only reason people see it as different is because people (incorrectly) perceive the humanities and social sciences to be in some way illegitimate, "made up", or (less charitably) "bs". from this perspective, technical language obscures the fact that humanities and social science scholarship says nothing meaningful.
obviously as a comp lit person I disagree, but I do think at the same time that getting too caught up in the technical language of the humanities can obscure important work that's being done in a way that perpetuates views of the humanities as "useless". in much the same way that I think it's important for scientists to make an effort to explain their science in ways that are comprehensible (and factually correct â contrast a lot of popular science reporting) without a long technical background in a scientific field, it's important for the humanities to be able to express itself in ways that make clear what it's actually doing and why that matters.
this doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing technical vocabulary, but it might be nice to tone it down a little sometimes, or at the very least to be conscious and careful of what happens when humanities scholarship descends too much into technical, theoretical terminology.














