CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Don Brenneis (Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz): "Regimes of Recognition: Metrics, Models, and 'Academic Charisma'" January 15, 2009, 4:30 pm. Place: Haines Hall 352.

For a number of years I have been studying peer review and other qualitative forms of academic 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 assumed 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. 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.