🍎Scholar, Stained
Your Scholarly Digest 2nd October, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

Today we welcomed our 44th member into Scholar Square. Words cannot express the joy with which we tell you that our little community is growing!

The shape of our space has yet to settle. But right now, as we tentatively exchange hello’s and explore The Study, The Parlour and The Square, it is hard to shake the feeling that something exciting is happening there. In Scholar Square we are putting the ethos developed through writing The Scholarly Letter into practice. Scholarship is a community undertaking; scholarship is pursued for beauty and curiosity’s sake, as well as utility; scholarship is an act of patience and care.

Why not come and join us as a Founding Member?

BRAIN FOOD

Dis/Interested Knowledge

In discussions of scholarship and knowledge, especially around the question of why we pursue it, the most honourable and romantic answer tends to be: knowledge for its own sake. This is an argument we ourselves often make in The Scholarly Letter: be it when defending the value of useless knowledge motivated by curiosity, or when sketching out our vision of what successful scholarship might look like. 

Some of us find ourselves extremely well-aligned with this rationale of disinterested knowledge. Adopting such a stance not only satisfies our innate desire and curiosity but also allows us, as scholars, to pursue inconvenient facts, matters, and truths “independently of extra-mural forces” that would otherwise bend knowledge to their ends. In this way, knowledge can remain — at least to some extent — outside of power structures. It gives us space for critical argument, for conflictual and never-ending inquiry, where knowledge resists being settled, ossified into doctrine, or claimed once and for all.

But some of us may hesitate to adopt a fully disinterested stance toward knowledge. For do we not pursue knowledge so that we, as human society, can advance our understanding of the world, benefit ourselves, and progress as a society—even as “progress” is itself a highly contested notion? To a certain extent, then, all knowledge is always “interested.” For instance, in his early work, Jürgen Habermas distinguishes three knowledge-constitutive interests: an instrumental interest in control and prediction, which gives rise to technical knowledge; an interest in collective understanding, which grounds hermeneutic knowledge; and an emancipatory interest, which drives critical forms of knowledge. Within this framework, Habermas left no room for disinterested knowledge: knowledge emerges from — and serves — the interests of human society.

There are, of course, critiques of both the camps of interested and disinterested knowledge. Knowledge for its own sake may be critiqued as serving the self-interests of the academic class, generating a kind of ‘scholasticism’ divorced from any concern for the wider world. Interested knowledge, on the other hand — critiques of which are plentiful — is more vulnerable to being harnessed by the interests of a powerful minority, steering the agenda to suit them rather than society at large. And yet, it is difficult to deny that today we are increasingly driven by interested knowledge; it is the more sensible way to account for why knowledge is pursued and valued. Knowledge for its own sake has become more an ideal rather than something that can be actually practiced. In the face of this, Ronald Barnett asks: 

Does knowledge for its own sake even make sense?

This is a question that has haunted me for some time. For now, my answer lies in holding together both interested and disinterested knowledge. I remain convinced that knowledge for its own sake — romantic as it may sound — enables us to do the best kind of scholarship. And yet, taken alone, it risks becoming too untethered, too divorced from the very world that gives rise to our inquiry. After all, knowledge emerges from people, things, environments, and societies — both human and nonhuman. We cannot, and should not, attempt to break away from the world we seek to understand.

Instead, we must keep “interest” intact: an interest rooted in the phenomena that fascinate and delight us, the aspects of the world that stir our curiosity and drive us to understand it more deeply. In this sense, interested knowledge should be guided by a single intention: to enrich the world. Importantly, our disinterest should extend so far as to keep us free from interests that lie beyond our inquiry. So while we may pursue knowledge for its own sake — to explore freely, unshaped by external ends — we must also let our interests carry the responsibility of care: care for the world from which our scholarship emerges, and to which it must always return.

CURRENT AFFAIRS

Old University, New Tech

The University of Oxford recently became the first university in the UK to offer access to ChatGPT5 to its entire faculty and student body. The financial investment to provide access to GPT5, the latest model, must be enormous: Oxford has over 26,000 thousand students and nearly 17,000 staff. Like other leading institutions around the world, Oxford has been quick to embrace the use of AI in education and research, even as fears for negative consequences from using these tools persists. 

Taking a moral stance on Oxford’s decision is beside the point: no matter how you look at it, the use of AI in educational and research settings is becoming institutionalized. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. To give credit where credit is due, the university has also published (and regularly updates) guidance on what it defines as “safe and responsible use”. If you haven’t had a chance to go through it, it's worth a few minutes of your time.

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Faculty Positions @ University of Bergen, Norway: click here

• PhD, Postdoctoral, and Academic Positions @ Aalborg University, Denmark: click here

• PhD, Postdoctoral Positions, and Research Positions @ University of Lausanne, Switzerland: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ University of Amsterdam, Netherlands: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

Scholar, Stained

Scholars may read thousands of words per day. Some are to be noted and kept for future use in our scholarship; most are to be forgotten. There are some things we read however, that change us, shape us, and mould our thinking: perhaps for a lifetime. Perhaps you are even now thinking of one such piece of writing? 

Below is a quote from a recent interview with Jerry Pinto, a Mumbai-based writer which so eloquently puts into words this experience that we all have in common:

For The Critic, some of her largest markings came from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas and Jane Bennet’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology Of Things.

For The Tatler, Bruno Latour’s Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?, JWN Sullivan’s The Limitations of Science and Alfred, W. Crosby’s The Measure of Reality have all left prominent stains.   

I wonder, dear Scholar, where yours came from?

If todays Scholarly Letter stirred something in you, write back and share it with us. We would be delighted to hear from you. A letter without a response is only half a conversation.