0.11 Roundtable discussion  (Page 5/5)

Patel : I shouldn’t be overoptimistic. Some neuroscientists still think music is not to be taken seriously as a topic of neuroscientific investigation. The more work we do and the more papers we publish, the more that type of attitude will fade. The world of neuroscience is opening up, with neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-everything. The trend is to try to understand phenomena that were once considered too complex and too subjective from the standpoint of the brain. This is an exciting move in neuroscience, but it requires dialogue between neuroscientists and people who are actually working in the other fields, such as economics, so they don’t over-simplify things.

Poovey : Through these discussions, I’ve been thinking about what I see as a generational challenge in humanities collaborations. My undergraduates are perfectly happy to collaborate, and my tenured colleagues are often open to collaboration. The problem is with graduate students and untenured assistant professors. That’s the period in their lives in which they are absolutely dominated by fear, and they know perfectly well that the reward system recognizes individualistic achievement. One of the things that I’ve been doing systematically in my graduate courses is building in a requirement for a collaborative project, just to get over that fear factor.

The one part of humanistic activity that seems to be intractably individualistic is reading. You might understand how writing or painting could be collaborative, but how can you read together, unless you read the book aloud? There’s a free website called bookglutton.com, in which you can set up a group of colleagues or students. Everyone puts the same book on their bookshelves, such as Jane Austen’s Emma . Then you ask the students to read, say, the first five chapters of Emma . As they’re reading it, they annotate different passages, and they can read what the others are annotating. It would take too long to read the whole book together in this way, but this exercise introduces a collaborative, interactive reading process that opens up the experience of immersive, individualistic reading to a completely different dimension. My students have found it startling to discuss other people’s reactions to the same text in real time. I encourage you to think of similar exercises that challenge this individualistic model of scholarly activity.

Levander : The irony of making concluding remarks at a conference devoted to “emerging disciplines” is not lost upon me. The very rubric resists closure, easy condensation, or summation, particularly in light of the fact that today’s symposium is the first of three held at Rice, to explore new forms of humanistic research that variously ignore, defy, or operate at the peripheries and blind spots of institutional frameworks such as departments, colleges, and schools. Rather than concluding today’s discussion, then, the following very brief comments are offered by way of opening up rather than shutting down conversation: of generating continuity and forging connective links between today’s symposium and those soon to follow.

Paul Courant and Michael Keller, ^{Paul Courant is University Librarian and Dean of Libraries, Harold T Shapiro Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, Arthur F Thurnau Professor of Economics, and Professor of Information at University of Michigan; Michael Keller is University Librarian and Director of Academic Information Resources at Stanford University, Founder and Publisher of HighWire Press, and Stanford University Press Publisher.} among others, have recently called for a “big humanities” that reproduces the “big science” approach (some would say “tactic”) of our colleagues in the science and engineering fields. Such a “big humanities” would identify large-scale research questions across humanities disciplines, generate a clear research agenda for funding agencies, and have the benefit of articulating, for once and for all, the importance of humanities research to administrators and to an increasingly skeptical public. Today’s panels have, among other things, reminded us that wholesale importation of scientific rubrics, institutional structures, and models of collaboration does not, necessarily, best facilitate new forms of humanistic knowledge production. The questions that are being asked in such unorthodox hybrid academic languages as cultural economy, digital humanities, and neuro-history, to name only a few, require not simply adding new conversation partners or laying claim to alternate disciplinary rubrics, no matter how effective at the ground level. More fundamentally, these questions, as we have seen today, challenge our speakers, among other things, to develop new models for collaboration itself.

Rather than accepting the disciplinary assumptions of the disparate fields they traverse, the scholars we have heard speak today are generating research questions, methods of analysis, objects of study, and research tools that challenge us to revisit the basic premises governing our disciplines. While it is certainly true that scientists and humanists have much to learn from each other by strategically joining forces, as we have seen today, new questions and possibilities for scholarly inquiry become visible when we revisit our long-standing assumptions about the sanctity of disciplinary coherence itself. Rather than adding the perspective of a seemingly outlying discipline (cognitive science, for example) to a familiar conversation in art history, the speakers today, in other words, have suggested the new hybrid languages and modes of inquiry that can emerge when we let go of the disciplinary apparatus as the default model for research production. We have heard the utterings of some of these new languages today, but there are, of course, others as well grumbling for attention: global health, new health media, neuro-aesthetics, and biopolitics, to name only a few. We will take these up, as well as continue to consider the inter-fields that we have begun to explore today, at the next Emerging Disciplines conference. I look forward to the continuing conversation and all the new modes of utterance it is creating as it unfolds.