14 - What Are We Fighting For? Academia or the Humility of Knowledge

Summary

This chapter challenges that claim that intellectuals comprise an elite class that possess a unique capacity to raise difficult questions and challenge the status quo. Nabil Echchaibi draws on his own collaborative work with scholars and artists on the questions of immigration, borders, and frontiers to suggest that scholarship is enriched when subjects are invited in as collaborators. He argues that scholars need to collective re-imagine research as a collaboration across a diverse set of expertise and genres, work that embraces the obliqueness of knowledge with the hope of producing an “other” form of knowledge that goes beyond the intellectual boundaries and epistemic and linguistic limitations that shape media scholarship. Rather than making our work more accessible to the public, he argues, we should be working with publics in order to transform our work to be more relevant and therefore more readily heard to publics beyond academia.