Talk:Mohammad Shahid Alam

If this page is to be included, what should be in it?
As a student at Northeastern who has taken a course with Alam, I have looked at this page a number of times over the past couple of years. One thing is for sure, this article is always biased; the writing and citations here are always of low quality; and the editors don't cooperate with each other in making this page better.

Let me just say that my personal interest in Alam stems from his peculiar anger towards the United States and the rest of the Western world. He is the type of guy whose passion and motives have clearly identifiable consequences, but at the same time, also have no easily identifiable origins -- and for that I am interested in learning more about what makes this guy tick. But beyond this, there isn't any real pressing reason for there to be an article about Alam. And to be clear, I am not saying that this article should be deleted. But I do think this article should be simple, straight-forward and written objectively.

And so, because there is clearly an interest in Alam, despite his marginal significance (this is not an inflammatory statement; rather, it is true that you will find that he is not widely published in any of the most-read academic journals, nor is he known among academic circles in his field. He is not widely cited, and he is not included in any rankings of prominent economists. He is simply not that important), and at the same time, because the quality of this page has suffered as editors delete and write-over previous work, we should lay down some basic ideas that we can generally agree should be included in this article:

1.) An objective summary of the focus of his scholarly work 2.) Any unique characteristics of this professor that distinguish him from most. And/Or perhaps a comparison of Alam's radical (and he is radical by any major, respected and modern economic institutions standards) views with the main-stream. Also, any comparison with well-known scholars, such as Chomsky. 3.) Any criticism and controversy involving this Professor 4.) Any other biographical information or interests of Alam's that may be of interest to the reader

In short, this page almost always sucks. Lets make it up to Wikipedia standards, otherwise, there isn't any real reason it should be here at all.

64.115.189.210 (talk) 15:46, 1 May 2009 (UTC)Student

deletion
I don't see any reason this person should be included in the wikipedia. He seems to be a very unknown economic professor who has contributed some minor articles to some leftist magazines.


 * He's widely published, even in major papers like Asia Times, Outlook India, and Al-Ahram (all three have subscribers in the tens or hundreds of thousands, the last one in the millions). You may not like his political views, but then again, this isn't Stalinist Russia, where you can silence people you disagree with.

The article should stay.

Change the sentence structure and made the language more objective.

deletion of "Harsh Criticism" comment
I have deleted the sentence dealing with criticism of Alam because it has no sources or links to back it up. I'm sure that Alam has a lot of people who criticize him for his views, but these criticisms should be sourced and verified. I'm not adverse to including these criticisms, I just think including a very out of place sentence in the article like it has now reaks of POV pushing. annoynmous 8:59, 24 February (UTC)

"no reputable journals"
Some biased individual deleted all the sourcing and list of articles and books that were previously presented here and replaced it with laughable rubbish about "no reputable journals." Clearly if this Alam is such a non-figure, why would someone go through the trouble of censoring all the information about him? And how can one say that publishing two books on economics in the academic press (Palgrave, Macmillan) is not "reputable?" This malicious person also removed the prestigious poetry publications Alam has appeared in.


 * Alam is well know to the radical left community..


 * So he IS well known. Well their you have it, from the horse's mouth.

Page Relevance
I would like to respond to the posts about whether this page should exist at all.

Alam is indeed well-known to the radical left community. He has recent publications in the Review of Radical Political Economics – the main journal of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE).

I am interested in linking his name to one of the heterodox economics categories, but I am not sure what I would classify his work as (and there is a SLEW of categories within heterodox econ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_economics). The reason I am having some trouble thinking about how to classify his work is that his approach to economics is very unique. He considers how important factors like colonialism and ethnocentrism impact economic problems today. Mainstream economists are often unable to identify these factors as important to their economic analysis because they do not see themselves as rooted in that context that is still overwhelmingly neo-colonial and Eurocentric, specifically.

Alam is relevant because he has written a lot about these topics and has indeed been widely published in both well-known/mainstream as well as more left of center publications. He has a number of articles in The Dawn, one of Pakistan’s premier newspapers.

I would be interested in putting up a summary of Alam’s major work. I am currently reading his work on the aforementioned topics for a project. Once I finish, I could put up a summary of his work.

Any thoughts? Econtennis (talk) 07:42, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Notability tag
Seeing as AfD has closed as no consensus, I think a notability tag is warranted on this article: there are few if any solid, reliable, third party sources giving this subject the in-depth coverage that would satisfy WP:GNG. He also fails the WP:PROFESSOR test. If anyone would like to contribute to the discussion on notability and how to improve this subject's ambiguous notability, I'll be happy to discuss here. Cheers! JFHJr (㊟) 17:04, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I agree that a notability tag is warranted, given the no-consensus AfD outcome. More sources are definitely needed. I have done some cleanup on the article, but more may be needed. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 17:58, 29 January 2012 (UTC)