[Air-l] Discipline(s) or not

Adrian S. Petrescu apetrescu at ONLINE.EMICH.EDU
Wed Nov 6 10:49:13 PST 2002


Just my two cents:

Did Newton's work achieve disciplinary status inside the discipline of
pre-Newtonian Mechanics?

but even more so:

Did Einstein's work achieve disciplinary status inside the discipline of
pre-relativistic Physics?  Did Einstein get a job in the discipline, let
alone build a career?

While (self-)recognition of disciplines is a social/epistemic
communities driven self-categorization exercise (thus potentially
exclusionary against non-mainstream participants), it is of course more
than that.

I think an important answer to the original operational definition(s)
question can be informed not just by asking only (1) what disciplines
are, but also asking as well (2) what disciplines DO...

For (1), pragmatism suggests disciplines _are_ if they are available as
categories in the Chronicle for example;-)  That may be much lesser of
an answer than the question intended/expected, but it certainly leads to
a measurable construct... if a much simplicist one.

For (2), I think the structure of inter-relationships with other bodies
of knowledge (and the communities behind them), whether those are
disciplinary organized or not, and the overall facilitating/constraining
dual nature of these relationships should matter.  I have more about
these relationships somewhere.  Suffice it to say: disciplines (and
people/administrators/knowledgeables in/representing them!) should be
flexible enough to allow and even promote non-mainstream approaches,
instead of blocking them.  It is from these non-mainstream approaches
that disciplines themselves develop further, whether such developments
shall occur at inter- or cross-disciplinary borders, and mainstream
later inherits back from such evolutions or not.

Beyond Internet Studies itself, there are ongoing debates for years
about the disciplinary nature of public policy, or public administration
and many more such "hybrids".  Are these debates relevant?  I shall hope
not in terms of those communities' ability to effectively produce usable
knowledge.  Unfortunately, much too often they are relevant in terms of
an individual scholar's ability to raise research money, get tenured
etc., or a department's ability to navigate/survive University budget
cuts etc.  The problem occurs when the latter starts to impact the
former, and thus to drive good scholars away from doing good work simply
because that good work is not mainstream enough...  And this is where
[established] disciplines fail in what they do (inadvertently or not
putting constraints on their very development).

My strong hope is that Internet Studies (IS) shall not fall into this
trap and the epistemic community defining IS now and in the future won't
let "mother" disciplines allow this to happen...

Thank you for your patience...;-)

BTW, since it is my first post since Maastricht/my joining: it was one
of the greatest experience I ever had, and boy, am I glad I finally
found such a lovely group of people.  I'm only hoping to be able to get
to know the group and each of its members better in the future.

--
Adrian S. Petrescu                          Phone: (734) 487 3160 (o)

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it 
exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy"
                                                  (Sir Ernest Benn)




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