Very much like the student who spoke up in class today, I was very excited to see Foucault mentioned so early on in the Luker text. I come from a cultural & social history background, so Foucault has been the bread & butter for many of my favorite classes.
However, Luker admits that her generation of scholars "were trained in a pre-Foucauldian era, and we have not really come to terms with what Foucault has done to our taken-for-granted ways of thinking, much less with what he has done to theory, and still less what he has done to methods." (7) Now, here for me lies the crux of the issue I have with Luker's text thus far.
Today's generation of MLIS students have been raised in an academic environment where Foucault's theories permeate deeply across disciplines - even if a student hasn't read Foucault, he/she most likely is familiar with social construction, and understands this belief to be extremely important to today's social science studies.
So who is Luker writing for? Today's student understands Foucault's theories, just as today's student understands the present info-glut situation, and intuitively knows how to navigate it. While I find Luker's text readable & entertaining, I suspect that it will not impart any ground breaking research information to me (or to the rest of the class).
But it's only the 2nd week so I'm keeping my hopes up!
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