[Air-l] What is a discipline - role of AoIR.

[Nancy Baym]

I of course can't help but think about all of this quite specifically 
in terms of the role of AoIR in Internet Studies and what our lofty 
goals should be, and I wanted to pose some of the questions this 
discussion raises for me. I start from the premise that while AoIR 
may be many members' favorite affiliation and conference, we are not 
likely to be conducting academic careers in an institutionally 
recognized department of Internet Studies. So one goal may be to 
provide a form of institutional credibility so that members' work 
will be recognized by tenure and promotion committees that want 
evidence of outside review. This is of course one of the major 
functions of well known academic associations, usually in the form of 
peer review association journals and conferences.

If we want AoIR to do this for us, then it raises the questions of 
what AoIR has to do to make that happen, particularly when we 
encompass people with extremely varied disciplinary, national, and 
local sets of expectations. I like the point Annette Markham raised 
that we have the opportunity to go about this in ways that other 
associations have not. We can imagine new possibilities and enact 
them if we want to. We don't have to be a Discipline. We can be 
something different and better that offers the best of disciplinarity 
without the worse of a mainstream that marginalizes challenging work.

What is the best of disciplinarity? Institutionally recognized 
credibility so you can get a good job and move up in your career is, 
alas, a huge part of it. This is a practical reality. Having access 
to a community that provides intellectual, career, and social support 
is another. My sense is that most existing academic associations do 
well on providing credibility, and less well on support (beyond 
providing job ad venues and conference interviewing opportunities), 
especially support for those outside the mainstream. AoIR has thus 
far attracted people who want to engage in a positive, respectful, 
and genuinely friendly model of intellectual practice. It has been 
exciting for me to see that alongside the new research projects, 
books, and special issues of journals that have emerged through our 
conferences, new friendship networks have also been started. I've met 
some of my favorite people through AoIR, and I expect to make more 
old friends in years ahead. That matters a lot.

When we talk about credibility, we are necessarily talking about 
disciplining: creating set(s) of standards of acceptable vs 
unacceptable, limiting the preferred venues in which to present 
research, and providing people with opportunities to actively 
participate in judging and often rejecting the work of others (as 
with the conference submissions). An association can't provide 
credibility if it approves of everything everyone does.  Our 
standards won't be delivered from the almighty, as Charles Ess notes, 
but through continuous discussions of what constitutes good research 
practice. How important is it that AoIR provide credibility? How do 
we apply standards? What kinds of structures could we build through 
which to apply them? How do we maintain and nurture a kind and 
stimulating ethos? How do we discipline and nurture one another in a 
way that does its best to speak to all the home disciplines and 
traditions in which members make careers?

I don't have a good answer to any of these questions. I see a lot of 
challenges and balancing acts ahead. My hope is that the right 
answers will emerge as we continue to discuss these and related 
issues together.

Nancy

________________________________________________________
Nancy Baym 	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
102 Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Lawrence, KS 66045, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org