ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, scholarship about the social construction of knowledge has moved along several trajectories. While one strand of this work laments the sustained tensions that erupted in the “culture wars” in undergraduate education, 1 another draws attention to the often obscured linkages between knowledge and power and articulates a critical role for academic knowledge in the creation of a democratic society. 2 Taken together, perhaps the greatest enduring contribution of this body of work is the way it has problematized long-standing assumptions about what counts as legitimate knowledge within the academy. 3 In exploring how areas of academic knowledge emerge and become legitimated, scholars have also observed how knowledge workers in emerging areas have struggled to gain credibility for their work (e.g., in alternative medicine) whereas others have had near unquestioned acceptance (e.g., in biochemistry).
