Do we not find that the repetitive deployment of certain phrases
and words in academic language entails a conceptualisation of
meaning into objects that are thereafter encountered daily not as
thoughts or ideas but merely as a socio-cultural force? Is it not
necessary to identify and illuminate them, and to contrive some
sort of resistance to their potent, though unrecognised,
illocutionary effects? This article concerns the everyday cultural
practices of academic life. It is an attempted intervention into the
mundane language use of academics in order to impact critically
upon the ongoing and constant articulation of certain culturally
latent assumptions into political effects. I argue that within the
social and human sciences ‘sump concepts’ are those extremely
common concepts that recur in analysis and explanation due to
their easy accessibility and to the function that they serve in
reproducing certain discourses of social power. In particular, they
constitute territorialisations of language, linguistic creations that
close off polyvocity, contingency and possibility through identitythinking
into sutured and reactionary conceptualisations. I present
a selection of three sump concepts that have become thoroughly
imbricated into the discursive culture of academic life – Bottom-
Up, Evolution, and Concrete – and that are complacently resorted
to on a daily basis in social science research and in social
discourse. By exploring their potencies, purposes and pitfalls, I
demand a more cautious and considered deployment of these
concepts in our academic discourses, and advocate for a critical
practice of negative dialectics.