Discipline Formation and Research Training

This chapter examines the training of several Anglo-American scholars who published in a cluster of fields in the humanities —including classics, archaeology, anthropology, history, and modern languages—before their specialization into separate disciplines. Intriguingly, instruction in research in these disciplines began very close in time to each discipline’s formation. Starting from this coincidence, the chapter asks whether research training gives rise to a discipline or the formation of a discipline precedes its particular way of training? The chapter’s answer is that research training alone cannot explain the emergence of disciplinarity, as many factors play into the formation of a new discipline. But the invention of research training, especially in academe, may have been the catalyst that made it gel.

História da Educação: Políticas, instituições e instâncias educativas – Vol. 2

This collection unites results of academic works concluded within the span of 2016 to 2020 in the field of History of Education for the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Comprised of two volumes, this second volume is made up of 21 chapters analyzing education from historical perspectives, and spanning from the XVIII to the XXI century. On its first part, the studies analyze educational polices relative to planning, implementation and reforms as they point out the challenges throughout the processes of schooling, discipline formation and development of educational systems on different levels of education; besides, analyzing the institutionalization of courses and teachers formation. The second part of the volume is comprised of researches debating education in a broad sense, highlighting those processes which take place in different environments of education such as associations, military corporations, the church, the press and the radio. The body of these works is marked by interdisciplinarity, which is a consequence of a dialog between a large, diverse documentation and theoretical references equally diverse.

“TO LOOK LIKE AN (EARTH) SCIENTIST”: SCIENCE POPULARIZATION AND PROFESSIONALIZATION BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF A PHOTO ALBUM DEDICATED TO THE VIENNESE GEOLOGIST EDUARD SUESS (1901)

ABSTRACT Self-visualizations and portraits of scholars play a crucial role for the identity and understanding of scientific disciplines. According to sociological thoughts on visualization, reproduction and modern governance, the new media of photography policed and controlled specific ways of self-imaging, defining and behaving as a scientist. In addition, photography can also be understood as a powerful tool for scholarly self-profiling, image cultivation and the promotion of science to the public. An impressive example of the visual representation of scholarship is a richly decorated photo album dedicated to the geologist Eduard Suess (1831–1914) on the occasion of his 70th birthday and retirement as a professor from the University of Vienna in 1901. As a collection of 332 photos of his students, colleagues and other earth scientists, the album served as a personal gift to Suess, but also as a visualization of how scholarly collaboration, hierarchy and the interdependence between students and academic teachers were practiced. Linking Suess’ photo album to theoretical concepts on scientific self-depiction and media history, the paper examines how rhetorics of display may be invoked and challenged in the context of professionalization, discipline formation and science popularization, and suggests renewed analytical attention to the role of portrait imagery in the history of science.

Individuals in International Relations

Chapter 2 reviews how International Relations (IR) scholarship has been treating individual agency, especially within the dominant theoretical frameworks, Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. Various analytical perspectives, such as the “levels-of-analysis,” foreign policy analysis, and the transnational relations approach, have reserved room for the analysis of individuals in world politics. But concerns about academic discipline formation and real-world relevance have led to a widespread neglect of individual actors. While James Rosenau’s research and the integration of social theory into IR offer fruitful ways of thinking about individual agency, they often overemphasize the structural situatedness of actors fulfilling social roles. Revisiting the structure–agency debate, the chapter takes inspiration from Margaret Archer’s sociological insights in order to propose that agency should be analyzed as a variable with an intrasubjective and an intersubjective dimension, which always requires contextual specification. Power, it is argued, should be seen as a disposition, and its exercise vis-à-vis other actors as an intentional project.

How “Facts” Shaped Modern Disciplines

This history of the concept of fact reveals that the fact-oriented practices of German physicists and historians derived from common origins. The concept of fact became part of the German language remarkably late. It gained momentum only toward the end of the eighteenth century. I show that the concept of fact emerged as part of a historical knowledge tradition, which comprised both human and natural empirical study. Around 1800, parts of this tradition, including the concept of fact, were integrated into the epistemological basis of several emerging disciplines, including physics and historiography. During this process of discipline formation, the concept of fact remained fluid. I reveal this fluidity by unearthing different interpretations and roles of facts in different German contexts around 1800. I demonstrate how a fact-based epistemology emerged at the University of Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, by focusing on universal historian August Ludwig Schlözer and the experimentalist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In a time of scientific and political revolutions, they regarded facts as eternal knowledge, contrasting them with short-lived theories and speculations. Remarkably, Schlözer and Lichtenberg construed facts as the basis of Wissenschaft, but not as Wissenschaft itself. Only after 1800, empirically minded German physicists and historians granted facts self-contained value. As physics and historiography became institutionalized at German universities, the concept of fact acquired different interpretations in different disciplinary settings. These related to fact-oriented research practices, such as precision measurement in physics and source criticism in historiography.

Deleuze as Subject – B2430.D454 – Mapping Deleuze Studies in the Library

Guided by Deleuze's taxonomic theory and practice and his concepts concerning the body, literature, territory and assemblage, this article examines library classification as a technique of discipline and bibliographic control. Locating books written by and about Deleuze reveals processes of discipline formation and the circulation of knowledge, and it troubles the principles upon which the classification is based. A Deleuzian critique presents the Library of Congress Classification as an abstract machine that diagrams knowledge in many academic libraries around the world.