[Air-l] What is a discipline.

radhika gajjala radhika at cyberdiva.org
Wed Nov 6 04:16:05 PST 2002


ditto to these bits from Danny and Matt...

(and adding my mumbled comments (that you wont hear this morning) to the 
comment about cultural studies and feminist theory labels (for both women 
and men) becoming cultural capital in some "interdisciplines" even as they 
actually serve to silence so-called marginalized voices by re-asserting a 
"chic"ness of their own...)

ethics of inter/trans/disciplinarity sounds pretty good - but who will lay 
down the Law on this one?

r

At 07:34 PM 11/6/2002 +1300, you wrote:
>but I get the feeling sometimes that the racial and feminist critiques of
>disciplinary exclusion have been heavily appropriated by people with a lot
>of socio-economic privilege to extend by avoiding issues of accountability
>to disciplines, cultures and socio-economic locations.
>Growing fields (though it would be interesting to hear from those in "named"
>programmes such as "Internet Studies" about how their enrolments are doing
>after the crash lol) tend to produce Pollyanna-ish discourses that gloss
>over these issues. Freed from the weighty constraints of disciplinary
>history, how many of us haven't enjoyed some sense of frisson at being in
>the middle of something new, exciting and developing? This is probably why
>so much new media discourse (particularly in the U.S.) takes place in
>Traweek's "culture of no culture", where ideas circulate with little
>reflexive positioning or critique.  As Dilbert put it during the boom, "Hey,
>I go to work, I get paid a million bucks. What's not to like?".
>
>So I guess I'm interested in an ethics of interdisciplinarity -  from which
>traditions do we draw from for our ethical frameworks, when these are no
>longer given? By this I don't mean the work on "researching online human
>subjects" which Charles Ess and co. have covered admirably. I guess I'm
>asking about an "ethics of being interdisciplinary". So I suppose this is
>more of a philosophical question (well outside my expertise:). And I was
>sure this post started out about institutional strategy! Anyway, any leads?
>
>Regards,
>
>Danny
>
>Matthew Allen wrote on 6/11/02 2:06 PM:
>
> > the boundaries or terrain which they enclose.  I would assert that the
> > difficulty for transdisciplinary scholars, such as found in areas of study
> > such as Internet Studies, is not in traversing the ground, nor crossing the
> > borders, of the many disciplines which they might encounter; rather, the
> > difficulty is one of connection with and deep understanding of processes.
>
>--
>http://www.dannybutt.net
>
>
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Radhika Gajjala

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