Melchior Blum

I thought I would end up writing a lot more on this website before handing in my thesis. I also thought once handed in, my thesis would be online much sooner so I can share it with all of you. Well, both assumptions turned out to be false… But anyway, you can now read and download my master’s thesis with the pretentious-sounding title “Epistemological (Un)certainties: The Literary Journalism of William T. Vollmann and Johny Pitts as a Challenge to Objective Journalism” on NTNU Open by clicking this link, or read the abstract below

In my last post, I introduced standpoint epistemology and mentioned how all kinds of knowledge have to be socially situated. The examples I used came mostly from a scientific field, as they were meant to show how scientists can be oblivious of their own biases. It is a common fallacy to assume that one’s knowledge claims are free of one’s positionality and that, like a God, one sees “everything from nowhere.”

Theory sounds boring, I admit. It’s the long chapter you must fight yourself through before you get to the fun part of any scholarly work (if you are a nerd like me and consider that fun). Theory is made up of abstract ideas, disconnected from anything practical, and often it wants us to throw a book away and turn to something that has in fact something to say. Sure, this can all be theory.

Having worked for almost half a year on my master’s thesis, I decided that it is high time to document and share my working process. Both for myself, so all the hours at my desk in Trondheim don’t feel as much as solitary work and instead I have to turn my free-floating thoughts into a somewhat definite form, but also for any potential readers that are interested in what I am up to these days.