Opportunities and Constraints of the Disciplines

Our disciplinary structure places constraints on research, but interdisciplinarity also creates challenges. The basic social science disciplines—political science, economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology—each tend toward a particular view of human nature and have disciplinary prejudices regarding topics and methods. Interdisciplinary work has identified these differences and worked toward integration, especially in common applied fields, such as education and public policy. Each discipline’s historical inheritance shapes contemporary practice. Rather than dismantling or reformulation of disciplines, strong and self-aware disciplines with scholarly exchange among them have advanced theory and empirical analysis.

Epilogue

The reception of the English Comedians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is connected to their representation in modern theatre histories by ideations of travelling theatre in Enlightenment theatre projects. Theatre-historical chronicles began to be written in the second half of the eighteenth century, by which time there was already a vocabulary for itinerant theatre ready to be applied to the English Comedians in order to understand their effect on national dramatic culture. Setting these relations next to the development of Theaterwissenschaft out of philology in early twentieth-century German universities, this concluding chapter reflects on the influence of disciplinary structure upon the investigation of controversial historical phenomena. Various sorts of patriotism and methodologism have distorted the comprehension of the itinerant theatre and concealed its involvement in the generation of dramatic art. The contemporary crisis within the discipline of theatre history is explained with reference to the underestimation of theatre professionalization, which was a profound discontinuity in the history of Western culture.

Modeling the structure of recent philosophy

This paper presents an approach of unsupervised learning of clusters from a citation database, and applies it to a large corpus of articles in philosophy to give an account of the structure of the discipline. Following a list of journals from the PhilPapers-archive, 68,152 records were downloaded from the Reuters Web of Science-Database. Their citation data was processed using dimensionality reduction and clustering. The resulting clusters were identified, and the results are graphically represented. They suggest that the division of analytic and Continental philosophy in the considered timespan is overstated; that analytical, in contrast to Continental philosophy does not form a coherent group in recent philosophy; and that metaphors about the disciplinary structure should focus on the coherence and interconnectedness of a multitude of smaller and larger subfields.

Bildungsheld or Pícaro, Canon and List: A Heterotopology for JS

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS is especially pertinent here: “Jewish Studies has emerged as an autonomous field that is strictly speaking neither secular nor religious, but academic.” The chapter turns, therefore, to the precedent of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Frankfurt, whose short heyday in the 1920s has bequeathed a model for extra-academic Jewish education, subsequently refashioned by others. What would JS look like if it weren’t tied to the institutional vicissitudes of academicized knowledge practices, if the reproduction of the academic system and social field, the magister-discipulusrelation, were not its determinative economy? Is, or can Jewish Studies be, a kind of heterotopia within the university’s borders? What would it mean for JS—as Rosenzweig envisioned for his students in Lehrhaus—to bring the outside in? As counter-example to Neusner’s essays in chapter 3, Rosenzweig’s essays determine this chapter’s focus. Implications of the chapter’s title, with its tension between hero and adventurer and closed or open catalogue, are taken up in the concluding pages.

Authoritative school climate and peer victimization among Brazilian students

According to the Authoritative School Climate theory, a school environment perceived with high levels of support and disciplinary structure can be a protective factor against violence. Therefore, the current study aimed to understand how support and disciplinary structure affected peer victimization among Brazilian students. Participants were 420 students from Brazil, between 7 and 14 years old (mean=10.02; S.D. = .91); 51.5% of the participants were boys. Measures were obtained from a self-report questionnaire with measures of victimization, authoritative school climate and sociodemographic data. Using multilevel modeling between individual and same-sex peer group analyses, 89.86% of the victimization variability was at the individual level. Results indicated a negative association between the student’s perception of support and reports of victimization, but no gender differences as predictors of victimization. Younger students who reported lowers perceptions of support also could be more victimized. *** Clima escolar autoritativo e vitimização entre pares em estudantes brasileiros ***De acordo com a teoria do Clima Escolar Autoritativo, ambientes escolares percebidos com altos níveis de suporte e estrutura disciplinar podem ser protetores contra a violência. Portanto, o objetivo desse estudo foi entender como o suporte e a estrutura disciplinar afetaram o relato da vitimização entre pares. Os participantes foram 420 estudantes, entre 7 e 14 anos (média=10,02; d.p.=0,91); 51,5% dos participantes eram meninos. As medidas foram obtidas a partir de questionário de autorrelato sobre vitimização, clima escolar autoritativo e dados sociodemográficos. Usando o modelo multinível, 89,86% da variação da vitimização foi no nível individual. Os resultados indicaram uma associação negativa entre a percepção de suporte pelo aluno e os relatos de vitimização, mas não foram encontradas diferenças entre gêneros como preditores de vitimização. Os alunos mais jovens, que relataram menor percepção de suporte, também apresentaram tendência maior para a vitimização.Palavras-chave: vitimização entre pares, clima escolar autoritativo, bullying.

Bringing the outside in: The limits of theoretical fragmentation and pluralism in IR theory

This article explores the current state of the discipline of International Relations(IR) and assesses the prospects for integration of new voices to the global conversation. The article argues that the current state of theoretical fragmentation that infects the discipline will be a severe barrier to the introduction of alternative visions of IR. Two factors explain the source of this problem. First is the dominant understanding of epistemology, which not only misunderstands the place of epistemology in the research process but also helps reproduce a social structure of fragmentation. Second, I briefly explore the dynamics of that disciplinary structure and argue that when combined with the approach to epistemology the two become mutually reinforcing, limiting the possibilities of a form of pluralism that can incorporate alternative voices unless they give up what it is that makes them different.

A comparison of citation disciplinary structure in science between the G7 countries and the BRICS countries

Purpose This study aims to compare the characteristics of citation disciplinary structure between the G7 countries and the BRICS countries. Design/Methodology/Approach In this contribution, which uses about 1 million Web of Science publications and two publications years (1993 and 2013), we compare the G7 countries and the BRICS countries with regard to this type of structure. For the publication year 2013, cosine similarity values regarding the citation disciplinary structures of these countries (and of nine other countries) were used as input to cluster analysis. We also obtained cosine similarity values for a given country and its citation disciplinary structures across the two publication years. Moreover, for the publication year 2013, the within-country Jeffreys-Matusita distance between publication and citation disciplinary structure was measured. Research limitations First, the citation disciplinary structures of countries depend on multiple and complex factors. It is therefore difficult to completely explain the formation and change of the citation disciplinary structure of a country. This study suggests some possible causes, whereas detailed explanations might be given by future research. Second, the length of the citation window used in this study is three years. However, scientific disciplines differ in their citation practices. Comparison between citations across disciplines using the same citation window length may affect the citation discipline structure results for some countries. Practical limitations First, the results of this study are based on the WoS database. However, in this database some fields are covered to a greater extent than others, which may affect the results for the citation discipline structure for some studied countries. In future research, we might repeat this study using another database (like Scopus) and, in that case, we would like to make comparisons between the two outcomes. Second, the use of a constant journal set yielded that a large share of the journals covered by WoS year 2013 is ignored in the study. Thus, disciplinary structure is studied based on a quite restricted set of publications. The three mentioned limitations should be kept in mind when the results of this study are interpreted. Originality/value Disciplinary structure on country level is a highlighted topic for the S&T policy makers, especially for those come from developing countries. This study observes the disciplinary structure in the view of academic impact, and the result will provide some evidence to make decision for the discipline strategy and funding allocation. Besides, Jeffreys-Matusita distance is introduced to measure the similarity of citation disciplinary structure and publication disciplinary structure. By applying this measure, some new observations were drawn, for example, “Based on the comparison of publication disciplinary structure and citation disciplinary structure, the paper finds most BRICS counties have less impact with more publications”. Findings The outcome of the cluster analysis indicates that the G7 countries and BRICS countries are quite heterogeneous regarding their citation disciplinary structure. For a majority of the G7 countries, the citation disciplinary structure tend to be more stable compared to BRICS countries with regard to the years 1993 and 2013. Most G7 countries, with United States as an exception, turned out to have lower values on the Jeffreys-Matusita distance than BRICS countries, indicating a higher degree of heterogeneity between the publication and the citation disciplinary structure for the latter countries. In other words, BRICS countries still receive much less citations in most disciplines than their publication output would suggest. G7 countries can still expect more citations than is to be expected based on their publication output, thereby generating relatively more impact than BRICS countries.

Human rights education’s curriculum problem

Employing a theoretical perspective from the critical sociology of education, this article identifies a curriculum problem in human rights education (HRE) in schools and suggests strategies to solve it. The main problem is HRE’s lack of an episteme—a disciplinary structure created in specialist communities—and, related to this, the flight of scholars from the field of curriculum practice, redefining it away from subject matter. A more robust HRE in schools will require not only advocacy but a curriculum, one that teachers can adapt to local needs, constraints, and students. Knowledge matters. If knowledge work of this sort is missing from HRE then it is difficult to claim that HRE has a social justice mission.