Literature Reviews are Epistemological, Not Just Technical
This blog is a repost. The original can be found on APU Writing Center’s Graduate Writing Blog.
We have come to the concluding blog post on how historiography can be used to great effect as a framework for writing literature reviews in the humanities and social sciences. In each of these blog posts, I started with concerns doctoral students often bring to their writing center appointments: How do I cite secondary citations? How much detail do I give for a theory or model? Is my tone “academic” enough? And am I including enough citations? These blog posts demonstrated how these questions are not merely technical; instead, they point towards deeper epistemological issues, or how we know something. Through these blog posts, I have shown how much writing style is more than mere mechanics; rather, writing style hinges on epistemology. Historiography is concerned with epistemology, or how people shape ideas and discourse, and therefore offers a model for addressing all these concerns.
So, as you write literature reviews and engage in academic discourse, keep the following principles in mind:
Incorporate your citations in a way that discloses existing conversations
Rather than reconstructing a theory, model, or discourse, deploy it by demonstrating a point about it—which means strategically excluding details and information so that you can include the most relevant
Write in such a way to de-naturalize ideas and show how they are the products of people who live and work in specific historical, sociological, and cultural contexts
Develop critical awareness of with whom you are engaging in your own work and how
These principles will look different depending on your discipline within the social sciences and what kind of research you are engaging in, yet don’t lose sight of them. Study literature reviews in your own discipline to see how these principles manifest in the writing style of your colleagues.
