The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, […]
Posts Tagged ‘interdisciplinarity’
Pandemic epistemology 2
Posted in Science & society, tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, frontier science, interdisciplinarity, pandemic politics, pandemic response, sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, transdisciplinarity on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]
The discipline of interdiscipline
Posted in Academe, tagged environmental humanities, environmental studies, grad student advice, interdisciplinarity, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, transdisciplinarity on May 16, 2014 | Leave a Comment »
The Rachel Carson Center’s Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies has come out (in PDF and MOBI formats). It includes pieces by Gregg Mitman, Rob Nixon, SueEllen Campbell, John Meyer, Basarab Nicolescu, and others. My piece, “The Discipline of Interdisciplines” (pp. 11-13), is intended as something of a collective statement from my generation […]
Ontologies of bilocation
Posted in Academe, tagged anthropology, interdisciplinarity, Latour, Ontology, epistemology on December 1, 2013 | 3 Comments »
For interdisciplinary scholars, it’s always a challenge to decide which conferences to attend and which to forgo. The problem is particularly acute when the conferences are held at the same time, as occurred last week with the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and American Academy of Religion (AAR). As I’ve been attending […]
The joy (& loneliness) of being interdisciplinarian
Posted in Academe, Philosophy, tagged Academe, anthropology, bifurcation of nature, disciplinarity, Foucault, geography, interdisciplinarity, Morris Berman, Occupy Anthropology, philosophy, political ecology, transdisciplinarity on December 13, 2011 | 3 Comments »
What makes an -ologist, -osopher, -ographer? What, for instance, makes one an anthropologist? A geographer? A philosopher? A scientist? Scene 1: As chair of a search committee looking to hire a political ecologist, a tenure-track position to be shared between a Geography department and an Environmental Studies program, I’ve been involved in intensive discussion of […]
Advice for environmental interdisciplinarians
Posted in Academe, tagged environmental studies, grad student advice, interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity on June 22, 2011 | 2 Comments »
The first issue of the new Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences is out and available here. The JESS is the journal of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences, which is meeting this week at the University of Vermont in Burlington (where I live and work, so I’ll be there). The first issue includes […]
interdisciplinarity & academic restructuring
Posted in Academe, tagged academic politics, interdisciplinarity on May 15, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Philosopher of religion and Derridean “atheologian” Mark Taylor’s recent NY Times op-ed End the University as We Know It has generated a lot of discussion in academic circles and blogs. Reading the article reminded me of a situation my institution, the University of Vermont, went through recently, after being approached by a foundation interested in […]