Introduction  (Page 2/2)

As “The Fate of the Disciplines” made clear, while relations between residual and emergent fields are anything but settled, these relations are part of larger historical fluctuations that aren’t going to be resolved anytime soon. The fate of disciplines, then, is to be internally bound up in these larger institutional processes.

The September 2009 symposium “Emerging Disciplines” and this collection of its expanded presentations attend to a slightly different set of concerns. The focus here is less on the waxing and waning of the disciplinary moon and more on those forms of knowledge that do not fit comfortably or even uncomfortably within the disciplinary regimes that have evolved over the last hundred years.

C. P. Snow coined the phrase “two cultures” to capture the idea that there are two cultures in the structure of knowledge that root themselves into different, often opposing camps, with regard to the set of epistemological presuppositions they employ. Snow coined the term in 1959, but the phenomena he was describing are, of course, much older. The idea that there are two cultures was a creation of the modern world; this concept was gradually institutionalized in universities. At the end of the eighteenth century, most scientists, as Eric Mielants observes, did not see religion and science as incompatible knowledge systems; it was transformations within the European university system that gradually isolated knowledge practitioners into different camps. In 1795, the Institut de France, for example, designated the natural sciences, literature and the arts, and the social sciences as belonging to distinct and different intellectual spheres. Meanwhile, the rise of specialized journals and the exclusion of the amateur nobleman from the scientific community after 1850 were part of a reallocation of intellectual resources for the new university, which acquired almost complete monopoly over the production and dissemination of knowledge by the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus, as Immanuel Wallerstein and Richard Lee observed, this two-culture formation is itself a product of modernity, and a longer view reveals that knowledge organization did not always fit neatly in the disciplinary boxes we have created in modern times. But such habits of thought are currently being revisited, and epistemological debate about the kind of intellectual-built environment that will most effectively support knowledge production and dissemination has become a topic of central concern.

This is our concern here, and the following papers will, in different ways, ask us to consider the following: What new ways of knowing become available when we leave assumptions about disciplinary order behind? What environmental circumstances give rise to new knowledge practices, and how might these practices alter disciplinary modes of knowledge production? And finally, what knowledge do we need to acquire to think effectively about the disciplinary models, like “two cultures,” that have served as central pillars of modern knowledge systems? While these papers examine a broad range of research questions and approaches, each has unanticipated points of overlap with others. These points of convergence, originating from what our current institutional structures have encouraged us to see as distinct realms, become evident when disciplinary boundaries are pressed upon and when disparate fields are brought together in temporary but potentially far-reaching collaborative exchange.

Bibliography

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