King of Disciplines
In response to the various calls one hears for more/better collaboration between disciplines, I give you:
Geography.
Where else but the faculty page of a Geography department could you scroll down a list of research interests and find Dr Cowling’s “Physiological significance of low atmospheric CO2 for plant-climate interactions” directly after Dr Cowen’s “Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada”?
Or a little further down the page, find Dr Gough’s “Interannual variability of Hudson Bay ice thickness” followed directly by Dr Goonesardena’s “Spontaneous Romantics of the World, Just Do It!”?
Instead of tinkering with our institutions to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, maybe it makes more sense to just have one very very big discipline, and put everything else inside it.
(photo: Brent Danley)
I once accused a geographer friend of being a practitioner of Stuffology. If a thing has a place (in some more concrete or diffuse sense of place), then the study of that thing can be grandly ushered into the folds of geography.
I recently realized with a pleased sort of shock that I may have officially become a geographer. How would a person know, I wonder?
I also wonder if the bunching together of academics who appear to be less concerned with following within the traditional frameworks of traditional disciplines is the result of a deliberate choice on the parts of those sorts of people to migrate into geography departments, or if the subsequent crossing of disciplinary boundaries is the emergent result of putting a bunch of people who would not normally speak together into one building.
Is that a geography question?
Hugh
March 13, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Are you a geographer? I don’t know – you’re no physicist – but that’s *definitely* a geography question. What I’m wondering is: in a discipline so vast, how do you approach the question? Do you model it, or do you take off from a foucaultian discourses hypothesis? I bet Bryan Wynne would have a lot to say about it; does that make him a geographer?
Jane Boles
March 13, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Yes, I think having a lot to say about something is an identifying characteristic of a geographer.
Hugh
March 16, 2009 at 4:19 pm
It was once the role of philosophers to occupy the largest most inclusive discipline, in which everything else resides. But, alas, many philosophers have lost the skill of collaborating, understanding science, or indeed, speaking with others.
But geography is fatally flawed as well. They could perhaps be the largest, most inclusive, scientific discipline. But so much important work is… outside of science. And I’m not sure geography is really up to it.
Don’t get me wrong. Three cheers for geography! I admire geographers. I like these folks because they take their maps (models) so seriously. And when you take the models seriously, as models, you tend to take seriously the difference between the model and the terrain. These people are my kind of people. But am I wrong in thinking that geographers are limited to constructing models of the earth (through time). That’s not a huge limitation, but it’s a limitation. Even the geographical missions that relate to human psychologies or human social constructions, or human interests or ethics, are still tied to their place on earth in time. That is to say, geography is primarily a descriptive enterprise…
Sherwin
March 17, 2009 at 9:15 pm
@Sherwin,
Outside of science? Where is that? Ha ha I kid.
“geographers are limited to constructing models of the earth (through time)”
That seems like it would be a reasonable definition of geography, but I think that contemporary geographers have been sneakily ignoring reasonable definitions of geography for a while. E.g., about half of the research topics mentioned above. It sometimes seems that geography may be functionally defined as “those things which are a) not clearly in those other disciplines and b) can be loosely said to be in a place at a time, at least sort of”.
Actually, maybe not the time part. I like the idea you suggest of geography as having an explicit temporal dimension, but to the extent that it has explicit dimensions (which I am arguing here it doesn’t) I’m not sure that time is one of them yet. Just X and Y, and not actually those.
Hugh
March 17, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Yes a lot of important work happens outside of science, and a lot of the people doing that work seem to be pulling the tight skin of geography out to encompass them. Sneakily, maybe, but not if it’s a good thing to have one big discipline with everyone in it.
I think it’s time to revisit the Faculty page:
Prudham, S.: “Pimping Climate: a critique of Branson’s entrepreneurial activism”
Rantisi, N.:”Branding the Design Metropole: the case of Montreal, Canada”
Hunter, M. “The Materiality of Everyday Sex: Thinking Beyond ‘Prostitution.’”
Mahtani, M.: “Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian “Mixed Race” Women and Multicultural Policy”
Walks, R. “The Boundaries of Suburban Discontent? Urban Definitions and Neighbourhood Political Effects”
Gilbert, E.:”Common cents: situation money in time and space”**
**explicitly temporal dimension!
And this is from one department. The same one where Dr Wells just published “Vortices in oscillating spin-up” for the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.
Seems to me if you can’t find it in geography then you don’t need it. And if you think you really need it, then bring it into geography.
Jane Boles
March 18, 2009 at 1:01 am
Sherwin pointed out that philosophy used to be the king of disciplines. Maybe it’s time we acknowledged this shift by ceasing to grant PhDs across the disciplines in favour of GeoDs.
Hugh
March 18, 2009 at 3:37 am
Or perhaps a Doctorate of Space (and Time) – SpD?
Sherwin
March 23, 2009 at 1:54 am