Talk:The Undercommons

A fact from The Undercommons appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 December 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that The Undercommons, an essay collection that criticizes academia, was written by two alumni of Harvard University?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/The Undercommons.

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Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Theleekycauldron (talk) 02:09, 7 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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... that the spread of The Undercommons, which could be downloaded for free after its publication, was compared to that of samizdat literature? Source: Harvard Magazine
- ALT1: ... that The Undercommons has been described as a manifesto for free thinking, "a provocative world-making project", and a demonstration of how the media enables policies meant to control the public? Source: [1], [2], [3]
- ALT2: ... that The Undercommons, an essay collection that criticizes academia, was written by two alumni of Harvard University? Source: Harvard Magazine

Reviewed: Sex Ed 120%

Created by Ezlev (talk). Self-nominated at 06:27, 25 November 2021 (UTC).[reply]

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy compliance:

Adequate sourcing: - Why is "The Undergraduate Historical Journal at UC Merced" a reliable source? I don't think that undergrad work is commonly counted as reliable per WP:SCHOLARSHIP.
Neutral:
Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook eligibility:

Cited: - See above
Interesting:
Other problems: - I think ALT0 should be rephrased to say who made that comparison, unless it's found in multiple independent sources

QPQ: Done.

Overall: (t · c) buidhe 13:43, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

buidhe, I've struck ALT0 since I don't think it's as interesting as the other two. Based on a reading of WP:SCHOLARSHIP it looks like the source from the UC Merced journal is not reliable other than perhaps to show the views of the groups represented by those journals – so I think it's okay to leave the mention of the review, which is clearly attributed, but I've removed the portion of the synopsis that's currently sourced to that review. Let me know if you disagree or if you think we're good to go, and thanks for the review! ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 19:37, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

User:Ezlev According to the website of this undergrad journal, it is run by undergrads and publishes undergrad coursework. Although you could argue WP:ABOUTSELF it's hard to see how an undergrad paper could be WP:DUE anywhere on Wikipedia. (t · c) buidhe 21:41, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough, buidhe. I've removed the paper entirely. Because that makes ALT1 unusable, I'll add ALT1a:
- ALT1a: ... that The Undercommons has been described as a book about "how to intellectually be together," as "difficult, beautiful, vertiginous, fortifying and enlivening", and as a manifesto for free thinking? Source: [4], [5], [6]
I think ALT2 is probably the best, though. ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 22:43, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

ALT1a and ALT2 approved (t · c) buidhe 23:29, 25 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

ALT2 to T:DYK/P7

Substance of the criticism

@Ezlev: - The current Synopsis section is woefully short, to the degree that if I'd been the DYK reviewer I wouldn't have passed it. There's an obvious, obvious question here - what was the criticism? There's LOTS of things that people can dislike about academia - which angles does the author take? Too many PhDs, not enough professorships? Grad students / lecturers are underpaid? Administration / faculty is too liberal / too conservative / too spinelessly moderate? Racist or classist? What even are the "undercommons" anyway (I'd guess the grad students & postdocs myself, but I'm wildly guessing)? Is it possible to expand this section at all? SnowFire (talk) 02:59, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

SnowFire, I haven't had time to expand the Synopsis section, but even if I had I'm not sure I would have known where to start. Actually, that's not quite true – I know I'd be able to add a subheading for each of the six component essays and a very high-level overview of the subjects that essay addressed – but anything beyond that would be difficult, for reasons that might become clear if you take a look at the PDF of the book. Moten is a poet-scholar, I think Harney is too, and the book is definitely equal parts poetry and scholarship – for example, What even are the "undercommons" anyway is a question I'd love to answer in concrete terms but I'm not sure I could even after reading the book from cover to cover, which I think the authors might say is part of the point. All that is to say that I wouldn't want my own (potentially mis)interpretations of the essays to serve as Wikipedia's synopsis for them. I'd be more comfortable letting third-party sources do the talking, but the ones I found don't go into much detail.

I'm headed into finals week immediately followed by a vacation, so I won't have time to take a swing at this for a while. Anyone reading this is of course welcome to beef up the synopsis themselves. If not, I'll get to it when I can. ezlev (user/tlk/ctrbs) 03:11, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough, although I'd argue that's a little suspicious if nobody is talking about what The Undercommons even is - weird, complex academic essays in the past have caused interpretation splits (your Sartres / Foucaults / etc.) but nobody even trying and failing probably means it wasn't really that widely read, and the Reception bit saying people had lots of opinions on it might be a bit overstated.

Anyway, Wikipedia is for a general audience - if an outsider reads "criticism of academia from Harvard grads", they could well think the kind of criticism from Harvard graduates Ted Cruz & Tom Cotton about critical race theory brainwashing America's youth or some such. I'll give a shot at including some back-of-the-book basics to make clear that's not the tack taken here. SnowFire (talk) 03:55, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you're saying about the sources, though. Why is nobody willing to state the freaking obvious that this is a far leftist perspective? You'd think that quoting Fanon and the like would have tipped people off, but I guess it's too obvious. Or even just basic things the essay seems to be trying to say that I'm pretty sure I understand the attempted statement, but have similar reservations as to you, it's not stated quite 100% plainly, yet the sources don't acknowledge this? I read the first two essays, and I have to say I really don't like this work, but I guess I'm not the target audience... SnowFire (talk) 04:54, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Ezlev: Sorry to distract you from your finals prep! Unfortunately, per the above, I think that this lack of content of the criticism is really quite a major problem for the reasons described above. I looked for sources in your existing cites (sadly some were paywalled) but aside from the New Yorker article making clear that the critique of "policy" was a general rant about government bureaucracy staffed by well-meaning college graduates and the like, there wasn't much. Yeah, it's frustrating to me that there isn't a source stating the obvious that this was a left-wing criticism, but as noted in the edit summary, if you look at the academics being cited, they're all on the left. I guess you could go about it backwards by just mentioning a bunch of philosophers mentioned and adding "leftist" in front of a bunch of them, but meh. I think this will have to fall under WP:SKYBLUE for now. I had originally hoped to use the back of the book! Unfortunately... well, read it yourself. It doesn't really help very much, and it would be really smarmy to quote it at length ("the authors claim that their work comes from the black radical tradition"). SnowFire (talk) 06:21, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Stefano Harney

I saw that there is a draft for Stefano Harney. Any help would be appreciated! Thriley (talk) 05:19, 13 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]