THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
presents a
Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series
seminar
Regimes of Recognition: Metrics, Models and “Academic Charisma”
by
Prof. Don Brenneis
4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Room 1118, K.K. Leung Building
The University of Hong Kong
ABSTRACT:
For a number of years I have been studying peer review and other qualitative forms of academic and
research assessment, examining how decisions based on such practices shape what becomes taken as
“knowledge” within Anthropology and the human sciences more broadly. In this very much in process
paper I turn to recently salient forms of “analytical,” quantitative assessment practices by which such
academic “charisma” – the likely value of past or proposed scholarly and scientific work – is supposed to be
made legible, transparent, and useful for decision-making. The forms and practices at issue here are
becoming central to academic and research administration in the UK and EU. They also are coming to shape,
through a kind of discursive seepage, local ways of evaluating our work and our field in the US and
worldwide. The critical ethnography underlying this paper – and the broader project in which it figures –
draws upon perspectives from linguistic and social anthropology, as well as from recent approaches to the
social life and consequences of documents.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Don Brenneis is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a past President
of the American Anthropological Association, past Editor of American Ethnologist, and current Co-Editor of
Annual Review of Anthropology. He is a linguistic and social anthropologist whose earlier major research
focused on language and conflict in a rural Info-Fijian community, considering in some detail the role of
language as social practice in generating, pursuing, and attempting to remedy disputes within and beyond
the village, including in the district court. He published widely on oratory, gossip, narratives, verbal abuse,
and other forms of talk and performance through which local social life was negotiated. More recently he has
focused on communicative and interactive dimensions of peer review as a crucial but generally invisible
process in the shaping of American anthropology and social science more broadly, drawing in part on his
experience as an editor, in part on his time as a participant in many research funding and program review
panels, and in part on a range of bureaucratic and institutional contexts in which both anthropology as a
discipline and the social sciences more broadly are being defined and transformed. Most recently his research
has focused ethnographically on bibliometrics and other quantitative practices becoming central to academic
and scientific evaluation.
ALL ARE WELCOME