Posts ⁂ The Postmodern Terminal >_
Anderson and During recast theory as a set of reading practices rather than a doctrine, which turns the ordinary work of sorting a field into an argument you have to defend.
Mapping a field looks like description. I will argue that it never is, and I will show it through Amanda Anderson and Simon During's Humanities Theory (2025), which turns on one load-bearing claim: categories carry assumptions.
Anderson and During's answer is refreshingly undramatic. Theory is not a fixed body of doctrine you swear allegiance to. It is a collection of reading practices, disciplined and self-aware ways of interpreting texts, evidence, and the world. Theory is what you are doing when you ask not only "what does this source say?" but "what is this source assuming? whose interests does its framing serve?" That makes humanities theory a foundations-of-method lens rather than one more school to shelve beside critical theory, affect theory, and actor-network theory. It sits underneath all of them and asks what interpretation involves.
A single school hands you answers: read everything through affect, or networks, or class. Humanities theory hands you questions to bring to any material at all. What is this framing taking for granted? What would a different frame make visible that this one hides? Anderson and During also stress that theory moves, travelling between literature, history, and politics, which is the border-crossing you need when you read a clinical guideline next to a community's own account of the same work.
Now put that beside the ordinary task of sorting a field into three bins: well-evidenced, emerging, absent. The sorting feels like reporting what is out there. Anderson and During would stop you here.
"Well-evidenced," evidenced by what? A randomised trial, an expert consensus, a practitioner's lived judgment? Each answer encodes a theory of what counts as knowledge. "Emerging," by whose clock, toward whose standard? "Absent," absent from the databases you happened to search, or genuinely absent? None of these is innocent. They are interpretive commitments wearing the costume of plain description.
Take a case. Suppose you are mapping practice in patient handovers, or teacher feedback, or congregational care. If your evidence bar is "peer-reviewed and measured," you rate a glossy, well-studied protocol as well-evidenced and file a wise old practitioner's undocumented routine under absent, even when the routine works better. That sorting is not a description of the field. It is a theory of knowledge, silently doing the sorting for you.
The point is not to paralyse you. Once you see that your categories are choices, you can make them deliberately and defend them: 1) you sort reflexively, able to say why each practice landed where it did; 2) you name the standard, since calling something "best" means measuring it against a yardstick; 3) you read the silence, telling a real gap apart from an artefact of where you searched. A map that admits its perspective is more trustworthy, not less. Interpretation is not the enemy of rigour here. Practised deliberately, it is the rigour.
Critical Race Theory presses the sharpest version: whose practices get canonized as "best," and whose get written out of the record? Born in American legal studies in the late 1970s and eighties, CRT holds that race is socially constructed and that racism reproduces itself precisely through rules claiming neutrality. Derrick Bell's "interest convergence" argues that gains for the marginalised arrive mainly when they also serve the powerful. Its central method is counter-storytelling, treating the first-person narrative of those left out of official accounts as rigorous evidence rather than decoration. CRT is a contested public topic, and it deserves presenting as scholars in the field do, central claims and principal critiques side by side.
Max Weber supplies the other half, re-aimed from social theorist to methodologist. Verstehen, interpretive understanding, licenses reading a practice for its meaning as rigorous inquiry rather than soft guesswork. The ideal type is a precise instrument: build a deliberately sharpened, one-sided model of "best practice X," not a description of any real case but a measuring rod, then hold real enactments against it to see how each falls short, exceeds, or redirects. Weber's demand that you make your value-relevance explicit keeps your standpoint honest.
So try this: build the ideal type, then write the counter-story from the margins, and see which one your map cannot survive.
The Postmodern Terminal >_