As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Emelie Whiting looks at Mark W. Rectanus’s “Performing Knowledge: Cultural Discourses, Knowledge Communities, and Youth Culture,” from Telos 150 (Spring 2010).
Academic discourse in the twenty-first century has undergone profound transformations. With new methods of knowledge production and consumption brought about by an increase in electronic resources and databases as well as the advent of social networking, there have been widespread changes in scholarly publishing, centers of knowledge, and knowledge communities. In his article “Performing Knowledge: Cultural Discourses, Knowledge Communities, and Youth Culture,” Mark W. Rectanus provides a compelling look at the shift in the significance and acquisition of knowledge resulting from changes in the publishing industry, literary reception, and access to different kinds of information as they stand in relation to a new “pedagogy of media”—a new way of teaching and learning in our technologically advanced age. Rectanus asserts that such developments require a revised conception of what it means to acquire knowledge as well as what constitutes scholarly knowledge.
