Where's the discipline specific academic gossip?

April 25, 2007 4:59 PM

I know where to go for gossip within my own academic discipline, but are there canonical blogs (on moves, hiring, graduate apps, big books, occasional meta-discipline discussion, etc). or rankings in other disciplines? The Chronicle and Arts and Letters Daily are more general. I'm looking for more discipline specific stuff.

I want to clarify that I'm not supporting the occasionally crazy gossip and navel gazing. I'm more interested in the sociology of academia here.

posted by ontic to society & culture (6 comments total)

I'm not sure if this is quite what you're looking for, but LISNews is a Slashdot-inspired site about librarians and information science.
posted by danb at 5:40 PM on April 25, 2007

For city planning (and similar): Planetizen and (supposedly, but I use it less) Cyburbia. Hmm, I'm not sure if it has the latest dish in the same way the site you linked does, so maybe there's an even better one out here. And I'm not sure "city planning" counts as a discipline, but I think it does.
posted by salvia at 5:49 PM on April 25, 2007

Lambda the Ultimate, the weblog of the academic community which does programming language research.
posted by gmarceau at 6:17 PM on April 25, 2007

I've found listservs to be a pretty good source of information, news, gossip in Academia.

Go to google and type in the search box:

site:.edu listserv and add the subject that you're looking for.

A couple others that I know real quickly:

Human Rights

Anthropology, Transnational issues, working class studies (a bit broader)

Additionally, professional academic associations (i.e. APSA for political science; AAA for anthropology) may their own listservs or links to discussions.
posted by fizzix at 7:21 PM on April 25, 2007

This one in political science is pretty insane. Hasn't been updated in a while, though.

Also, grad students' blogs tend to be pretty gossipy.
posted by chickletworks at 7:47 PM on April 25, 2007

Man, I've known philosophy was a little weird in this respect, but now I'm suspecting the worst -- that we're somewhat unique in our public navelgazing.

For what it's worth, chickletworks' example is exactly what I'm looking for.
posted by ontic at 3:09 PM on April 26, 2007