Gossip, Epistemology, and Power
Knowledge Underground
Book
Chapter
This chapter surveys the history of gossip from its origins in intimacy to its current degraded status as trivial, false, or malicious.
Chapter
This chapter examines a double standard in academic gossip; it is used by outsiders as a way to get and spread information and ideas about the profession, while being invisibly used (while externally denounced...
Chapter
This chapter articulates some conditions that facilitate negative gossip: compromised trust, small, insular communities, and sharp or turbulent power divisions.
Chapter
This chapter summarizes the book, argues for a single, consistent standard around the use and identification of gossip, and suggests social practices that facilitate good gossip.
Chapter
This chapter introduces the book’s argument. Despite its bad reputation, gossip is a crucial epistemic tool for marginalized people, as a way of comparing ideas and constructing arguments.
Chapter
Gossip’s specific contributions to knowledge are demonstrated; it helps people select ideas or hypotheses from a host of possibilities, and it helps synthesize apparently disconnected ideas or information.
Chapter
This chapter examines gossip in American politics; while gossip has been a long-standing accompaniment and facilitator to political negotiation, its presence has been selectively denounced in recent case studi...
Chapter
This chapter examines online gossip and argues that while online gossip can be crucial for some marginalized communities (as a way of finding virtual solidarity amid physical marginalization), its anonymity, i...