SEARCHING FOR THE SOUL OF ACADEMIC DISCIPLINES: A FEW ADVENTURES IN THE TYPOLOGY OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES KĘSTAS KIRTIKLIS
Vilnius University kestutis.kirtiklis@fsf.vu.lt
What are academic disciplines? Natural kinds inhabiting the university environment or rather tribes ready to fight for each foot of their space in the academic woods? Or perhaps they are called into being by the decrees of the education policy makers and research administrators? Drawing on my own experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, working in the disciplines of philosophy and communication studies, and the research on the disciplinarity in the humanities and social sciences, I will analyze and compare two rival approaches to this problem. The partisans of the first perspective argue that the disciplines have some essential features that make distinctions between them clear-cut. These distinctions are embodied in the different methods various disciplines use, not the different objects they focus on. For example, an economist and a sociologist may both be interested in such topics as money or family; however, the research questions they pose will be quite different as well as the ways they conduct the research. The other approach, inspired by the so-called social studies of science, takes a nonessentialist point of view and defines disciplinarity using the external – social and/or political – characteristics. The adherents of this approach focus either on the disciplinary identity of the groups of scholars (to describe them they use the metaphors of academic tribes or even academic gangs) or on the interchangeability of the parts of various academic institutions (e.g., departments), or their abilities to create and sustain particular academic markets. I will argue that although the latter approach seems to be based on arbitrary premises, it describes already existing academic practices more adequately and also serves better as a prescription for further developments in the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, this approach encourages and explains the possibility of such widespread contemporary academic practices as interdisciplinarity or artistic research. Keywords: academic disciplines, humanities, social sciences, typologies, essentialism, social studies of science.
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