We raised a complex of issues, from Hazal and Joyce and others, about access as a central question for the definition of disciplines and their relations. Who gets in—to the schools, programs, rooms, journals, etc.—and who does not. How does leading with that question change how we look at the landscape as it exists, and as it might? What do a discipline’s relations with the wider world have to do with its relations to other disciplines? Etc. As we begin to look toward collaborative work for the exhibition, perhaps this is a promising concept.
Another (raised esp. by Utku) had to do with the risk that in putting certain kinds of knowledge on the other side of a rough humanities / sciences divide, we limit our capacity to understand our own situation, especially in terms of the economics and labor politics that shape the university.
Let me reprise the distinctions that we drew in order to fill out the problem of “knowledge production” as a paradigm for humanistic work: sciences on the left, humanities on the right (social sciences where?):
objectivity—subjectivity
information—interpretation/critical thinking
collaboration—autonomy
reproducibility—singularity
for profit, for social good—for itself, for social good
fact—value
instrumental/unreflective—ethical/reflective
How workable are these distinctions; how much are they an imaginary, and specifically, the humanities’ imaginary? And if the humanities are understood to have a distinctive power to think every question as a test of its premises (in contrast with “normal science,” in Thomas Kuhn‘s phrase), how well do we live up to that?
I ask these questions partly to frame Utku’s. Partly also to wonder how questions of access fall in that division or whether they lead us toward other frameworks.
