[Air-l] What is a discipline.

Louise Ferguson louise.lists at ntlworld.com
Tue Nov 5 14:43:26 PST 2002


At 14:44 05/11/2002 -0500, Irene Berkowitz wrote:

>Please let me be clear that personally, I am not trying to establish or
>join in an argument about who is right or wrong about whether Internet
>research is a discipline, but I am searching for an operational
>definition of the concept/construct of "academic discipline."
>
>I am curious as to the type of criteria that generally defines a
>"discipline".  It strikes me that Internet Research may qualify as a
>"Studies" area, which at least to my way of thinking may represent some
>intersection of more traditional disciplinary approaches, by interested
>parties wanting to study similar content areas.   There is a long
>history to the notion of a discipline and to the philosophical and
>ideological "Wars" that have erupted over 2500 years to qualify the
>knowledge production of a specific "discipline" as a legitimate means to
>gain academic, critical and/or scientific understanding.
>
>It would seem to me that a discipline operates within a conceptual
>framework that represents a set of paradigmatic structures which are
>commonly subscribed to by members of that discipline-- meaning a
>somewhat shared philosophic or methodological sets of approaches which
>give validity to the work that is produced within that framework.

<snip>
Or take a 'discipline' like HCI, human-computer interaction (CHI in the 
States) which is a blend of psychology, design, systems, research methods, 
ethnography etc etc, each bringing its own conceptual framework to the mix. 
The borrowing of conceptual frameworks from other disciplines seems almost 
to have become de rigeur in some fields.

Louise Ferguson





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