Disciplinary Coherence Research Articles

Academic literacy in enabling education programs in Australian universities: a shared pedagogy

AbstractWidening participation in higher education has led to the global expansion of universities, increased student and program diversity, and greater provision of flexible pathways into university. Critical to supporting a growing student body is helping all students develop their ability to communicate confidently and effectively in their academic communities. This research employs a collaborative benchmarking framework to explore academic literacy instruction in pathway or ‘enabling’ programs across nine Australian universities. While prevailing assumptions hold that such programs are overly diverse, the findings demonstrate that these programs have developed remarkably similar approaches; in particular, the investigation found that the programs all drew on established academic literacy models and reflected an emerging disciplinary coherence across the enabling education sector, despite the lack of a formal curriculum and standards framework.Kindly check and confirm the processed Article title is correct.This is correct

Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology

An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of epistemological and political legitimacy within British psychology in the past hundred years. Eysenck was both lionised and disparaged during his life and after his death. This account explores that ambiguity in order to discern the challenge for British psychology to maintain disciplinary coherence. An understanding of this fluxing historical picture is guided by the meta-theoretical resource of critical realism.

Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology

Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology

Disciplinary emphasis and coherence of integrated science textbooks: a case study from mainland China

ABSTRACT Integrated science is a ubiquitous school subject that is found in primary and middle-school levels around the world. Being a hybrid subject comprising several science disciplines, it poses many challenges to teachers as they are obliged to teach beyond their disciplinary comfort zones. In addition, this subject is prone to a lack of coherence, which helps people see how a small number of key ideas in a discipline can build upon each other to deepen understanding. Using integrated science textbooks from mainland China since 1990 as a case study, their (i) disciplinary emphasis (i.e. which topics & disciplines were emphasised) and, (ii) coherence of topics were therefore examined. The results showed that physical science topics were heavily and consistently emphasised in these textbooks, which likewise corresponded with the high number of buttress topics found in this discipline. Life science topics were the next most emphasised followed by earth science ones, a trend present since the 1990s in this country. We conclude with implications for improving science teacher training/professional development as well as student scientific literacy from this study of disciplinary emphasis and coherence in integrated science textbooks.

Research on Interdisciplinary Characteristics: A Case Study in the Field of Artificial Intelligence

In order to show the interdisciplinary laws of the subject fields and analyze the interdisciplinary structure of the field and the contents of knowledge research, a clear-structured framework of interdisciplinary feature recognition is constructed. Taking the field of artificial intelligence as an example, this paper analyzes it from the aspects of disciplinary diversity and disciplinary coherence. Disciplinary diversity is characterized by the distribution of disciplines, Shannon entropy and Rao-Stirling index. Disciplinary coherence is based on network analysis, which mainly includes discipline citation network and core, important and marginal discipline-keyword cooccurrence network at a finer granularity level. These two levels more comprehensively show the distribution and flow of discipline knowledge in this field. Through empirical research, it is found that the field of artificial intelligence involves a variety of disciplines, and its interdisciplinary situation evolves over time, forming clusters of disciplines with tight knowledge flow. In addition, the cross-topic domains of disciplinary research are also different. The results show that the framework system has certain reliability and can provide reference for related research.

Bridging the gaps: How students seek disciplinary coherence in introductory physics for life science

Undergraduate students feel satisfaction when physics helps them make sense of phenomena previously encountered in a biology or chemistry course.

Anniversaries, Trajectories, and the Challenges for the Communication of Sport

This editorial essay by Communication and Sport Editor-in-Chief Lawrence Wenner is drawn from his March 31, 2017, keynote address honoring the 10th meeting of the Communication and Sport Summit convened by the International Association for Communication and Sport (IACS) in Scottsdale, AZ. The first section focuses on anniversaries, noting recent anniversaries of key works, the “coming of age” of the disciplinary area and the publication changes ahead for Communication and Sport as the journal enters its fifth year. The second section considers questions about disciplinary coherence for the study of communication and sport and points to key role that IACS can play in reconciling three distinct dispositions at play in scholarship: (1) media, sports, and society disposition; (2) sport communication as profession disposition; and (3) communication studies and sport disposition. The third section considers key challenges ahead for the study of communication and sport, calling attention to the need for the field to think globally, to avoid ethnocentrism, to grow and embrace an international scholarly agenda that reaches beyond the confines of the west, and to work to diversify and become an inclusive and interdisciplinary community of scholars.

The Situation of Practice-Led Research Around NIME, and Two Methodological Suggestions for Improved Communication

The author offers a pair of proposals for possible practice-led tactics for live electronic music research, both aimed at enhancing musical communication within the sub-discipline and based on activities that the author takes to be informally present in much of the conduct of musicians. By way of background, he first explains why improving musical communication is important in terms of its potential benefit to our disciplinary coherence and our collective ability to communicate fruitfully with each other and with researchers in allied disciplines.

Critical Nexus or Pluralist Discipline? Institutional Ambivalence and the Future of Canadian Sociology.

While some scholars believe in a transdisciplinary future for the social sciences and humanities, we argue that sociology would do well to maintain its disciplinary borders, while celebrating the plurality of its intellectual, social, and political content. Although a pluralist position can threaten disciplinary coherence and increase fragmentation, we argue the counterbalance ought to be convergence around shared institutional norms of knowledge production. Establishing these norms is not easy, since there is a great deal of institutional ambivalence at play in the field of sociology. As such, sociology is pushed and pulled between two poles of at least four major continuums of knowledge production, which include the following: (1) interdisciplinary versus discipline-based research; (2) political versus analytical scholarship; (3) professional versus public/policy sociology; and (4) local/national versus global audiences. Since both sides of these ideal-typical continuums contain their own pathologies, we propose adopting a balanced position to correct for the shortcomings of each. Rather than imposing one philosophical or theoretical paradigm for the field, we suggest that embracing the "chaos" of our diverse forms of knowledge and centralizing and integrating findings will serve to strengthen our collective efforts in the long term.

Strong and Weak Forms of Mediatization Theory: A Critical Review

Abstract During recent years, the concept of mediatization has made a strong impact on media and communication studies, and its advocates have attempted to turn it into a refined and central theoretical framework for media research. The present article distinguishes two forms of mediatization theory: a strong form based on the assumption that a ‘media logic’ increasingly determines the actions of different social institutions and groups, and a weak form that questions such a logic, though the latter form emphasizes the key role of the media in social change and singles out mediatization as a central ‘meta-process’ today. Exponents of the weak form have convincingly criticized the notion of media logic. However, the weaker version of mediatization is itself problematic, as its advocates have failed to produce a clear explanatory framework around the concept. We argue that, although the analytical status of mediatization is unclear, fascination with the concept will, in all probability, continue in the years to come, due to the promises of heightened disciplinary coherence and status that this notion has conveyed for media and communication studies.

The Fragmented Object: Building Disciplinary Coherence through a Contextual Unit of Analysis

I argue that fragmentation has long been written into the core of the psychological disciplines through the acceptance of an objectivist unit of psychological analysis. Remedies to this fragmentation, including arguments for reductionist unification, problem-focused pluralism, and disciplinary specialization, are discussed but found inadequate to the basic problem. I contend that any hope for a coherent approach to psychological knowledge must begin with a move toward a more contextual way of framing psychological phenomena—toward an acknowledgment that the socially and morally embedded dynamics of knowledge production constitute our most basic and indivisible phenomenon. I discuss work in critical psychology as an exemplar of a whole family of traditions that have demonstrated the promise of such a contextual unit of analysis. Finally, I issue a call to take up the intergenerational labor of developing a unit of analysis more local, more organic, more indigenous, and more appropriate to the embedded complexity of psychological phenomena.

Inscribing a discipline: tensions in the field of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics, the application of computer science to biological problems, is a central feature of post-genomic science which grew rapidly during the 1990s and 2000s. Post-genomic science is often high-throughput, involving the mass production of inscriptions [Latour and Woolgar (1986), Laboratory Life: the Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press]. In order to render these mass inscriptions comprehensible, bioinformatic techniques are employed, with bioinformaticians producing what we call secondary inscriptions. However, despite bioinformaticians being highly skilled and credentialed scientists, the field struggles to develop disciplinary coherence. This paper describes two tensions militating against disciplinary coherence. The first arises from the fact that bioinformaticians as producers of secondary inscriptions are often institutionally dependent, subordinate even, to biologists. With bioinformatics positioned as service, it cannot determine its own boundaries but has them imposed from the outside. The second tension is a result of the interdisciplinary origin of bioinformatics – computer science and biology are disciplines with very different cultures, values and products. The paper uses interview data from two different UK projects to describe and examine these tensions by commenting on Calvert's [(2010) “Systems Biology, Interdisciplinarity and Disciplinary Identity.” In Collaboration in the New Life Sciences, edited by J. N. Parker, N. Vermeulen and B. Penders, 201–219. Farnham: Ashgate] notion of individual and collaborative interdisciplinarity and McNally's [(2008) “Sociomics: CESAGen Multidisciplinary Workshop on the Transformation of Knowledge Production in the Biosciences, and its Consequences.” Proteomics 8: 222–224] distinction between “black box optimists” and “black box pessimists.”

Igniting Constructionist Imaginations: Social Constructionism’s Absence and Potential Contribution to Public Sociology

Why have social constructionists remained absent from debates over public sociology? I argue that constructionist scholarship would be particularly amenable to Michael Burawoy’s notion of ‘organic’ public sociology, given the ability of constructionist scholars to orient awareness contexts in order to help engender constructionist imaginations. This approach requires that constructionists take on a different view of the role of the analyst. I also discuss some of the problems Canadian academics have had engaging with the media in their efforts to engage in ‘traditional’ public sociology, as well as what a constructionist public sociology may look like practice. I conclude by addressing potential challenges to a constructionist public sociology within Canada, including reference to sociology’s disciplinary coherence and how we can approach—and what we mean by—‘publics’.

Sociology’s objects, objectivity and objectives

In the late 19th and early 20th century steps were taken to establish academic sociology in the USA, England and Australia. In America the project was a success and the discipline was well established by 1945, yet in England and Australia it made nothing like the same progress. In England it struggled against the influential extramural social research movement, while in Australia sociology’s case was so poorly managed and presented that it was swamped by other disciplines, especially economics, and did not officially join the university system until 1959. The article examines these three attempts to institutionalize sociology before 1945 in terms of three themes of disciplinary coherence: theorization of ‘society’ as a broad object, entailing an attempt to locate sociology as the integrative social science; the quest for ‘scientific’ objectivity; and the practical objective of social reform. While present in all three countries, it was only in America that these themes were organized and presented in such a way as to successfully institutionalize sociology in the academy.

The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies

With the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature and a steep decline in tenure-track hires in literary studies, faculty across English are rethinking their relationship to writing. As interest in digital media grows, together with rising enrollment in courses in creative, civic, and professional composition, can the figure of writing provide a sense of disciplinary coherence? What will it take for literature faculty to agree that they, too, are interested in writers and writing?

Politics and Pleasure: The Philosophy of Physical Education Revisited

Humans unquestionably derive pleasurable physical sensations from different types of movement. Yet, remarkably, there is a deafening silence around the subject in the literature on human movement. This article comprises three parts. First, I outline prevailing conceptualizations of pleasure as they relate to physical activity in the social sciences and biology. Second, I sketch the history of physical activity in modernity which I describe as a process of de-pleasuring, and third, I discuss the prejudice against pleasure in the academy and in state policy. In the conclusion, I propose pleasure as a potential pillar of disciplinary coherence in physical education.

The medium and materials of popular music: ‘Hound Dog’, turntablism and muzak as situated musical practices

AbstractPopular music studies has rarely exhibited the kinds of disciplinary coherence found in closely related disciplines mostly due to the field’s adoption and adaptation of methodological and theoretical innovations from a variety of disciplines, notably sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, media studies and musicology. However, many commentators continue to seek disciplinary coherence without making any critical aesthetic distinctions between the medium and materials of popular music. Distinctions and interrelationships between the literal or material aspects of popular music and the social or cultural processes of making meaning from popular music are central to the definition of a particular but not exclusive field of analysis. Through such distinctions, the very category ‘popular music’ can be understood as a more flexible and supple distinction based on an understanding of methods of construction, production and mediation in specific relation to the technical, contextual and sociological aspects of music. I use different performances of ‘Hound Dog’, the practices of ‘turntablism’, and the exigencies of Muzak as examples for analysis offering ways in which the aesthetic, material and contextual aspects of popular music can be understood in order to incorporate the actual sound of music into the analysis of its social, cultural and musical construction.

How to Think about Environmental Studies

It is not possible to date when environmental studies became ‘Environmental Studies’. Nevertheless it has had a turbulent history marked by inconsistency, conflict and change. It is not surprising that at present it lacks disciplinary coherence and is subject to various definitions, often contradictory. There is ongoing speculation as to the cause of this identity crisis: ‘curricular universalism’ (absence of a unifying concept), academic territorialism and pedagogical clashes. I argue that a philosophical inquiry into the role of values in Environmental Studies provides the missing coherence and unity. Further, I argue that environmental problems directly related to deliberate human action are the province of applied philosophy and offer a formal argument to support this claim, and briefly address and dismiss the controversy over the teaching of values. I conclude that Environmental Studies is inherently part of the philosophical enterprise; as such it belongs with the humanities. The discussion takes as its starting point the context of college and university education in the US, but the issues raised have more general relevance.

HAROLD INNIS, CULTURAL POLICY, AND RESIDUAL MEDIA

Harold Innis resides as a defining figure for the disciplinary coherence of communication studies, economic history and cultural history in Canada. And yet, he remains largely unknown abroad. This paper reassesses his contributions to cultural policy studies through an examination of Innis’s historical argument about technology, knowledge and power. Whereas he has been understood typically as a rigid technological determinist, this paper argues that Innis charted social relations as products of multiple historical forces. He proposed a model for studying the layering of the new and the old in technological and cultural life. Moreover, his analysis accounted for uneven development, showing how certain technologies can become root elements in the construction of empires. In sum, Innis’s thought alerts us to the way the administration of cultural policy decisions creates the context for further initiatives.

In Defence of British Politics: The Past, Present and Future of the Discipline

In recent years the study of British politics has come under increasing pressure from a variety of developments within academia, most notably a growing trend towards analyses which take the international arena as the main focus of inquiry. This article argues that such changes have had a detrimental effect upon the status and cohesion of the study of British politics as a self-contained discipline, but that the recent decline of academic interest in ‘British politics’ has also been accelerated by the failure of British politics’ scholars themselves to overcome the historical problems associated with the Westminster model. As such, this article traces the evolution of British politics as a field of study, and highlights some of the main challenges that it presently faces. Primarily, these are based around a lack of disciplinary coherence, an insufficient integration between theoretical and empirical, as well as historical and contemporary analyses, and an inadequate conceptualisation of continuity and change.