Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-06T01:49:57.383Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aliens in the Academy: A Paradisciplinary Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Bridget Roussell Cowlishaw
Get access

Extract

In the last decades of the 20th century, authors touting academic credentials made their way into the public discourse on alien abduction. In the process, these academics have manufactured a rhetorical space in which to speak from professional expertise while at the same time enacting rhetorical conventions of contemporary public discourse in the United States that limit the validity of expertise. The authors accomplish this by appealing to the contemporary American taste for democratic discourse. By democratic, I mean discourse that privileges knowledge derived from personal experience rather than from objective reasoning — a way of knowing that requires no credentials but the ability to render oneself a speaking subject.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 28 , October 2004 , pp. 1 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Bass, , Ellen, , and Laura, Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.Google Scholar
Blume, E. Sue. Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its After Effects in Women. New York: Ballantine, 1990.Google Scholar
Brown, Courtney. Cosmic Explorers: Scientific Remote Viewing, Extraterrestrials, and a Message for Mankind. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000.Google Scholar
Brown, Courtney. Cosmic Voyage. New York: Penguin, 1996.Google Scholar
Bryan, C. D. B. Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: A Reporter's Notebook on Alien Abduction, UFOs, and the Conference at M.I.T. New York: Penguin USA, 1996.Google Scholar
Ervin, Elizabeth. “Academics and the Negotiation of Local Knowledge.” College English 61, no. 4 (03 1999): 448–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiore, Edith. Encounters: A Psychologist Reveals Case Studies of Abductions by Extraterrestrials. New York: Ballantine, 1989.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, Renee. Repressed Memories. New York: Fireside/Parkside, 1992.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hollinger, David A. “The Disciplines and the Identity Debates, 1970–1995.” American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. Ed. Thomas, Bender and Carl, E. Schorske. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David M. Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.Google Scholar
Jacobs, David M. The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mack, John E. Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. New York: Ballantine, 1994.Google Scholar
Mack, John E. Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. New York: Three Rivers, 1999.Google Scholar
Matheson, Terry. Alien Abduction: Creating a Modern Phenomenon. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1998.Google Scholar
Penley, Constance. NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar
Randle, Kevin D. The Roswell Encyclopedia. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.Google Scholar
Richardson, James T., Joel, Best, and David, G. Bromley, eds. The Satanism Scare. New York: Aldine, 1991.Google Scholar
Spanos, Nicholas P. Multiple Identities and False Memories. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1996.Google Scholar
Thompson, Angela. Diary of an Abduction: A Scientist Probes the Enigma of Her Alien Contact. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads, 2001.Google Scholar
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar