Disciplinary Configurations Research Articles

University press publishing and the ecology of disciplinary fluidity: General observations

AbstractAcademic book and journal publishing constitutes the majority focus of university presses. Besides commercial scholarly publishers, academic scholars and researchers view the opportunities provided by university presses as important venues for the dissemination of their research. This discussion focuses on the disciplinary imperative to publish scholarship that is ever more fluid and specialized as academic disciplines continue to become further nuanced in their response to the increasing knowledge produced by humanities and social science inquiry. The focus is on university presses and not commercial scholarly presses, although constitute a significant locus of scholarly publishing. What are the general characteristics of academic specialization and university press publishing? Further, how is disciplinary fluidity, especially evolving specialization, reflected in university press book publishing nomenclature and how scholarship is tied to the intellectual preoccupations of academic specialization? Multi‐ and inter‐disciplinarities further articulate disciplinary publishing, accelerating disciplinary fluidity. Examples from disciplinary and emerging configurations of disciplinary nomenclature utilized by university presses offers insight into specialization and publishing. Academic history publishing is used to illustrate newly emerging fluid disciplinary configurations.

Show Me the Bibliography: Indigeneity and the Eighteenth Century

Show Me the Bibliography:Indigeneity and the Eighteenth Century Alice Te Punga Somerville (bio) What is Indigenous about the eighteenth century? What is Indigenous about this special issue? What is the difference between, on the one hand, studies of the eighteenth century that trace European imperial expansion and thus necessarily talk about Indigenous peoples and, on the other, whatever is happening in this collection—or indeed, whatever is happening specifically in these two longer essays by N. S. 'Ilaheva Tua'one and Julia Lum? If the mere presence of Indigenous peoples, knowledges, and worlds as objects of study or as topics of focus or as strands of interest was a satisfactory answer to these questions, it would be entirely plausible to argue that a great deal of existing scholarship about the eighteenth century could have been included in these pages, and that a special issue like this is surely redundant. An alternative answer could be that all of the people who have produced the scholarship are Indigenous—but that's not the case in this volume. Still another could be that the scholarship engages Indigenous language archives, or perhaps is written in Indigenous languages—but those aren't the cases here either. [End Page 255] Perhaps the answer is more about argument and method than about topic—that the scholarship in this special issue seeks to decenter Eurocentrism by centering Indigenous perspectives, although what such grand (and laudable) ambitions look like on the page, and in the review process, quickly becomes subjective and complex. How much less Cook does an essay need before it becomes Indigenous? Does it count if the focus is on how Cook and his peers and their crews engaged with Indigenous peoples, and if it does, how is that actually about Indigeneity and not just about non-Indigenous perspectives? How does one center "perspectives" of Indigenous peoples without resorting to stereotypes or generalization? And, for the purposes of this journal, how might one account for Eurocentrism (decentered or otherwise) or for Indigenous perspectives using the tools—and people—available through current academic conventions for ensuring and assuring rigor? A response I would proffer, which is less of a compromise and more of a stance than it might first appear, is: "all of these things and more." These questions—and my answer—may seem circular, but they sit at the heart of Indigenous literary studies and Indigenous Studies more broadly, and they provoke us to think carefully about the shapes and stakes of our research.1 None of the possible answers suggested in the previous paragraph is enough on its own, but together they weave something tangible. I use the metaphor of weaving here quite deliberately. This lineup of considerations is neither a bullet-point list of things for which keen (or cynical) scholars should aim, nor a tool for evaluating the degree—the quantum—of "Indigeneity" (or "engagement with Indigeneity") in scholarly work. Rather, it is the intersection and interlocking nature—the mutual reciprocity—of these answers that matters. In this issue, and particularly in the pair of longer essays, we find a constellation of researchers, approaches, topics, and archives. Placing pressure on any one essay to critically engage Indigeneity in the eighteenth century in its entirety would miss the point not only of a special issue but also of the broader calls for engagement with the longstanding critical work of Indigenous Studies scholarship. We might look, then, to the broader cloth in which these essays and this issue are woven: to bibliographies which direct us to broader conversations in which the researchers are enmeshed; to the positioning of authors in institutional and Indigenous contexts; to those gorgeous points where individual pieces here speak to each other in ways that stitch together communities, texts, questions, and archives that are usually separated by contemporary disciplinary configurations as well as by empire-based and state-based networks. We can hold this special issue that foregrounds Indigeneity alongside similar volumes in journals that have overlapping interests in the period or topic.2 We can consider the likelihood that each of these pieces will move around so many Indigenous kitchen tables, desks, and social media messaging platforms as Indigenous scholarly...

Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto

This short essay is a polemical exploration of recent scholarship on media and resource extraction, with remarks on the necessary revisions this work entails to the purview and practice of studying cinema and media. Drawing on emergent works that elucidate the significance of media’s embeddedness in extractivist logics, we reflect on the ideas that propel them and the future conversations we hope they will provoke. As old disciplinary configurations no longer fit the task of understanding the technological instrumentalization of life in the face of climate breakdown, we consider the ways in which reckoning with modernity’s dependence on extractive industries and modes of labour reformulate media histories, the disciplinary study of media objects, our horizons of thought and our ways of being.

Exploring the drivers of malnutrition in West Africa from health and social science perspectives: A comparative methodological review

West Africa has a high burden of malnutrition and the drivers are often complex, highly context-specific, and cut across individual, social, political and environmental domains. Public health research most often considers immediate individual health and diet drivers, at the expense of wider considerations that may fall outside of a health agenda. The objective of this systematic mapping review is to map the broad drivers of malnutrition in West Africa, from public health and social science perspectives, and to evaluate the additional value of an interdisciplinary approach. Evidence was gathered from one public health (MEDLINE) and one social science (International Bibliography of Social Science) database using a detailed search syntax tailored to each disciplinary configuration. Literature was screened against pre-determined eligibility criteria and extracted from abstracts. Studies published in English or French between January 2010 and April 2018 were considered for inclusion. Driver categories (immediate, underlying and basic drivers) were coded against the UNICEF conceptual framework of malnutrition. A total of 358 studies were included; 237 were retrieved from the public health database and 124 from the social science database, 3 studies were included in both. The public health and social science literature document different drivers, with MEDLINE most often reporting immediate drivers of malnutrition and the International Bibliography of Social Science database reporting underlying and basic drivers. The combined literature offers more balanced representation across categories. An interdisciplinary approach proved successful in achieving complementarity in search results while upholding rigorous methods. We recommend that interdisciplinary approaches are utilised to bridge recognised gaps between defined disciplines.

Disciplinary configurations for scientific production in Mexico´s education. An approach from education’s sociology and the formation of the Educational System

El presente texto es producto de una pesquisa sobre la conformación disciplinar de la investigación educativa en México en su relación con la institucionalización del sistema nacional de investigación a través del Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT). Ha sido escrito para identificar la articulación de los núcleos teóricos y metodológicos procedentes de la sociología con los acontecimientos históricos más relevantes en la creación del Sistema Educativo de México, los cuales han estimulado la formación del campo científico de la educación en el país. A lo largo del trabajo se establece la relación entre los paradigmas de investigación, la producción teórica clásica y contemporánea de la sociología de la educación y los sucesos críticos con los cuales se consolidó el sistema educativo nacional.

Reimagining Research and Practice at the Crossroads of Philosophy, Teaching, and Teacher Education

Background/Context This article introduces the special issue on reimagining research and practice at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. The authors provide an overview of previous research at this “crossroads” and describe how the special issue collaborators have sought to chart fresh ground in light of current practical and policy challenges that teachers and teacher educators face. Purpose/Focus of Study The project that gave rise to the special issue emerged from a self-study, conducted by the first two authors, of the Program in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. They have been rethinking the place of philosophy in teaching and teacher education, while also re-examining the place of teaching and teacher education in philosophy. They see opportunities for creative work at the “crossroads” of these fields of practice and inquiry, while also appreciating the numerous pressures in our era on educators to adopt an unnecessarily narrow, economics-driven agenda. To pursue this interest, they organized a conference whose participants are the authors of what follows in this issue. Setting/participants The organizers invited six graduates of their program, who focus on teaching and teacher education, to participate in an intensive, two-day conference that would address prospects for re-envisioning generative work at the “crossroads.” They asked each graduate (now a tenure-track or tenured professor) to invite a colleague rooted in other disciplinary configurations—but also invested in teaching and teacher education—to collaborate with them. The conference featured six presentations by these teams of colleagues, who are, in turn, the co-authors of the six core articles included in this special issue of the journal. The faculty organizers also invited two senior scholars steeped in teaching and teacher education to work with them as commentators before, during, and after the conference. Project Design In preparation for the conference, held at Teachers College on November 9–11, 2017, the 17 participants devoted approximately eight months to extensive collaborate work, including the construction of a conference bibliography that would inform their work. During this time, each team of future co-presenters/ co-authors (a) conceived a topic they would examine together, (b) prepared an initial outline of their planned inquiry, and (c) composed a draft of their forthcoming co-presentation at the conference. At each of these stages, the two senior faculty in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, and the two invited senior faculty, provided critical commentary. After the conference, the co-presenters transformed their work into articles. This process included several pre-established rounds of critical commentary on drafts by the senior faculty. The upshot of this collaborative endeavor are the studies presented in this issue: (1) a philosophical perspective on what are called “core practices” in teaching, (2) the philosophical underpinnings of an approach in teacher education entitled “Interruptions,” (3) what it means to think of teachers as “handlers” of student and community memory, (4) reimagining childhood, and what it means to work with children, through the fused lens of philosophy and practice, (5) teaching and teacher education understood as racialized pedagogies, and (6) how educators can expand conceptions of what it means to succeed in society. Conclusions/Recommendations The authors elucidate ramifications for research and practice of our collaborative work at the crossroads of philosophy, teaching, and teacher education. They address why ethical insight is as vital an outcome of research at this crossroads as is newly minted knowledge. They spotlight philosophy's dynamic place in the practices of teaching and teacher education, including how it can help us reconceive the very idea of “good” practice. The authors suggest that philosophy need not be “applied” to education, as if philosophy and action inhabit different worlds, because educational work is always already saturated with philosophical questions and considerations, whether practitioners identify them in such terms or not. Put another way, the authors show how educational practice can transform philosophers’ understanding of the purposes and scope of their field. They argue that philosophers, scholars of teaching, teacher educators, and teachers all have an indispensable custodial or stewardship role to play in education. They are the people best positioned to care for both the practice of teaching and its practitioners. As such, it is important for them to sustain a meaningful, collaborative conversation, especially in the present context of worrisome political trends and continued pressure on educators to narrow their remit in the face of economic and other non-educational considerations.

Sobre las ruinas del futuro: científicos en la ficción argentina de la última década

El presente artículo plantea la hipótesis de que en la literatura argentina de la última década la investigación científica ocupa un lugar de privilegio solo comparable al lugar que ocupó a fin del siglo XIX. A partir de un trabajo sobre Informe sobre ectoplasma animal, de Roque Larraquy y Diego Ontivero, de El archivo del honorable Doctor Rudolf Wolgang Gerhard, de Pablo Marquevichi y de Las constelaciones oscuras, de Pola Oloixarac se propone que la novedad de estos textos se relaciona con una nueva configuración disciplinar de la ficción.

Histoire scolaire à l’école primaire : configurations et conscience disciplinaires. Retour sur un corpus de recherche.

Trois axes sont developpes conjointement dans cet article : poursuivre le travail de specification du concept de conscience disciplinaire, dans la continuite de travaux menes anterieurement par d’autres didacticiens ; reprendre un corpus deja constitue et en etudier certains elements en adoptant des choix methodologiques explicites ; formaliser, par l’analyse, des formes de la conscience disciplinaire pour l’histoire scolaire, qui puissent contribuer a enrichir le champ des recherches en didactique de l’histoire.

University Presses and Emerging Disciplinary Configurations and Orientations: An Exploration and Discussion

University presses publish books according to their respective publishing specializations and programming. Disciplinary interests supported by university presses align with their strengths and adaptation to the vicissitudes of the scholarly communication system. This discussion frames changes in humanities and social science disciplines published by university presses via examination of AAUP Directories for 1998, 2003, 2008, 2013, 2017 to ascertain and clarify disciplinary alignments and changes in emphases over time. Special attention is focused on discussion of disciplinary emphases, including evolution of nomenclature and changes for multidisciplinary and area studies. Over the past 20 years, university presses have published scholarship reflecting the changes of disciplinary orientation captured in subject interests and emphases, evolving with disciplinary changes occurring in academia.

SCIENTIZING THE HUMANITIES

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways.

Aldeas indias entre la antropología y la historia

En los entendimientos de India, la aldea ha sido encontrada y se ha perdido varias veces ya. Tan importante es la aldea como unidad de entendimiento, como los materiales para su estudio que los académicos parecen deliciosamente descubrir, sólo para, de forma incierta, perderlos y después recuperarlos nuevamente; de hecho, estoy a punto de unirme a este coro.

Control Societies: Notes for an Introduction

First published in Michel Butel's popular review L'Autre journal, of which he was an editorial board member, Gilles Deleuze's essay on control societies, re-published in Pourparlers in 1990 and later translated as the 'Postscript on Control Societies' (hereafter just the 'Postscript') has proved to be one of his most widely cited pieces of work. (1) Presented in historical terms as the successor to the disciplinary configuration of power elaborated by his friend Michel Foucault, the logic of control sketched out by Deleuze has proved highly suggestive within the arts and social sciences (in Anglophone countries in particular), as a means of articulating understandings of a range of historically grounded shifts in the organisation of power. Yet, brief as it is, Deleuze's essay can scarcely be thought to offer anything like a complete account of control, whether that is to be understood either uniquely on Deleuze's terms or, in particular, as a comprehensively established contrast to the disciplinary logic presented by Foucault. Its cursory and suggestive form makes the historical basis of the argument obscure, and, whilst it makes numerous references to concepts established by Deleuze elsewhere in his writings (modulation, dividual, order-word/pass-word and so on), the broader basis of its connections with his more carefully established accounts of, for example, capitalism, are not entirely obvious. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the Postscript's success: presenting no comprehensive, detailed account of the logic it nonetheless seeks to outline, it lends itself to multiple uses, a quality that is as practically valuable as it is theoretically frustrating. Such incompleteness, and the cursory nature of the contrast with disciplinarity, might, of course, lend credence to suspicions about the analytic value of the idea of control, suspicions that quite readily reinforce a view of Deleuze as a philosopher with, on the one hand, a sketchy understanding of history and, on the other, a marked tendency to read other philosophers (including Foucault) very much according to his own interests and proclivities. Given that Deleuze was a writer whose attention to and analysis of the construction of the 'oeuvre', and the functions played by different kinds of writing, was always carefully nuanced, it is difficult for us to read the cursory, suggestive, quality of the Postscript prima facie as a defect. In this respect it might be worth reviewing, briefly, some aspects of the pragmatic situation of the Postscript before trying to arrive at any conclusions about what Deleuze might have been doing, or trying to do, with it. The first, and most obvious, point to note is that the 'Postscript on Control Societies' was published first in a relatively popular, if slightly unconventional, journal (Butel, who had connections with the La Borde clinic, has a track record of setting up journals that challenge mainstream formats). The text was then republished in Negotiations, a collection of interviews spanning the years 1972 to 1990, shortly before Deleuze's last joint writing with Guattari, What is Philosophy?. The texts included in Negotiations are only a selection of Deleuze's circumstantial texts from this period, so it would be (at least philologically) improper not to acknowledge an editorial decision on Deleuze's part regarding that selection. We know from other writings of Deleuze's that he was somewhat hostile to the mediatic format of an interview (or other kind of text) in which one 'explains oneself'. The incursion of marketing into publishing, and thence philosophy, had also been an issue with which he had been concerned for some time (not least since his pamphlet critiquing the 'nouveaux philosophes'). Negotiations has none of the experimental conversation in which it is not entirely clear who is speaking when--that Deleuze had previously constructed with Claire Parnet in Dialogues, a text which reprises themes that had featured in Deleuze's broadside against the new breed of media 'intellectuals'. …

Karl Maton: Knowledge and knowers: towards a realist sociology of education

In this book, Karl Maton draws together his scholarly work over more than a decade to offer an accessible route into the sociology of knowledge. He locates this work within a corpus that has called for the ‘reclaiming of knowledge (Moore 2009; Muller 2000; Young 2008). The lay person might wonder somewhat about this endeavour, given that it might be assumed that education research, if nothing else, would be centred on concerns around knowledge. Yet, as Maton and others have cogently shown, somehow we got distracted. In focusing on valid concerns about, for example, access to higher education and its broader role in reproducing or challenging social relations, we lost sight of what is at the heart of what we do in education. Maton terms this ‘knowledge blindness’. The key impetus for the work in this book is the sociology of Basil Bernstein (2000), described here as a ‘launching pad for theoretical innovation’. Maton takes the foundational Bernstein concepts and shapes these into a larger and expanded framework. At pains to demonstrate the very cumulative knowledge building that is argued to be crucial for the progress of scholarship, in this book he takes the reader on a close journey through the evolution of this framework, termed Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). In LCT, Bernstein’s notions of classification and framing are reworked into ‘specialization codes’, which describe the basis for legitimation in knowledge fields. Maton distinguishes both epistemic relations (to knowledge) and social relations (to knowers) from which can be identified a range of disciplinary configurations. Although the powerful shorthand of ‘knowledge code’ and ‘knower code’ disciplines is used at points in the analysis, Maton is emphatic that this does not imply a dichotomy—these code settings lie

The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts (review)

Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins up, 2010. 194 pp. Rather than resisting research and social power of sciences, field of literary studies has new opportunities to leverage scientific discoveries, particularly in psychology and neuroscience, to argue for its own enduring relevance. Scholars can draw on intellectual freedom and breadth that have always been part of literary studies and that allowed literary scholars (Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, for instance) to make such inroads across disciplines during turn to theory in 1980s. A similar openness to interdisciplinarity places literary scholars at forefront of reconfiguring visual studies in 1990s, through work of W. T. J. Mitchell, Mieke Bal, and others. The Neural Sublime begins with precisely this question: namely, What do literary studies stand to gain from greater engagement with recent work in neuroscience and ... sciences of brain and mind? (ix). Richardson does not claim to provide single answer but delivers six essays in which he experiments with different clusters of research in cognitive sciences as starting points or interpretive Gestalten for readings of Romantic texts. Richardson claims to take iconoclasm of New Historicism further making more pronounced and extensive use of models, theories, and findings arising from recent work in neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology (xi). He suggests that he develops might be called kind of neural historicism. By this, he intends reading of literary texts in their cultural and intellectual contexts but guided by interpretive questions which derive from cognitive sciences. As Richardson notes, mind's embodiment or materialist conceptions of have certainly been thinkable at various points in history, including during Romantic period (13). One question for scholars then is how to think through coincidence of patterns in Romantic-era texts in relation to what we are currently learning about brain and mind (12). Richardson wisely chooses to adopt discoveries in cognitive science as rubric for seeing patterns in, or new avenues into, series of issues which have not been resolved in Romantic literary studies: problem of delineating specifically Romantic version of sublime (chapter 2); relationship between Romantic concepts of imagination, genre of apostrophe and primacy of visual (chapters 3 and 4); persistence of representation of sibling incest in Romantic writing (chapter 5). As Richardson argues, noting coincidence between current representations of and mental behaviors and literary representations of past represents beginning not end, of process of literary interrogation (15). Richardson outlines some of theoretical stakes involved in new disciplinary configuration known as cognitive literary studies. In his introduction, Cognitive Historicism, he points out for instance that literary analyses informed by cognitive sciences have tended to produce synchronic literary readings. These have focused on more abstract sets of issues in areas ranging from narrative and narrative theory, literary poetics (imagery, metaphor), discourse theory, pragmatics, and even acoustics (2). He sees less attention paid to diachronic: to matters of literary history including contextual richness of New Historicist literary approaches. He therefore argues for a middle course between realism on one side and cultural relativism on (3-4). Evolutionary literary theorists stand too close to objectivist realist perspective, tending to treat literary texts ahistorically. approaches of middle ground, such as those of Mary Thomas Crane, Ellen Spolsky, or Elizabeth Hart, include materiality of brain in their understanding of texts and their production, acknowledging the profound effect of cultural and other environmental factors in shaping perception and representation, yet resisting relativism of poststructuralist theory (4). …

Theory and Asian humanity: on the question of humanitas and anthropos

What can an Asian theory be? Is the question a blatant oxymoron, or some intellectual anomaly? What is at stake in this enquiry is not the character of Asia at all. On the contrary, what makes the pairing of Asia and theory somewhat strange is our presumption that theory is something we normally expect of Europe or the West. (Europe and the West must be differentiated historically and geopolitically, but for reasons of space the two designations are treated almost interchangeably in this article.) Just like any other civilization, Europe produces knowledge, but it is distinguished from other civilizations by its unique mode of operation in knowledge production. Until recently, Europe was proud of its commitment to theory—or philosophy at large—in the sense that it determines itself in terms of the secondary or derivative mode of theory: it is constantly reflecting upon, criticizing, and transforming its own manner of knowledge production. The Europeans regarded themselves as an exceptional kind of humanity capable of theory, and they called themselves humanitas in contrast to other types of humanity, namely anthropos: those who produce knowledge, but are incapable of reflecting upon and criticizing their modus operandi in knowledge production. However, the central topic of this article is not the dichotomy of humanitas and anthropos which still shapes the disciplinary configuration of human sciences today, but rather what has been generally referred to as the crisis of European humanity. This crisis stems from the fact that it has been increasingly difficult to sustain the exceptionalist notion of the West or European humanity. Through an examination of the crisis of European humanity, this article discusses what the status of theory might potentially mean to us in relation to Asian humanity today.

Situating Clio's Influence in Humanities and Social Science Monographs: Disciplinary Affiliations and Historical Scholarship

Historical scholarship is found in various humanities and social science disciplines. Beyond the traditional historically oriented research and scholarship, as vetted by historians trained and educated in the profession, historical scholarship is situated within other disciplinary configurations as well. This essay offers a larger intellectual discussion of historical research and scholarship published in disciplinary venues outside history proper. Using AHCI and SSCI databases, data were collected for book reviews appearing between 1977 and 2006 to ascertain disciplinary and journal affiliations. Historical scholarship is situated in many fields in which a historical perspective or historiographically grounded scholarship is pursued. Indeed, the historical enterprise is much more intellectually pervasive vis-à-vis other disciplines than may be commonly supposed.

Situating Clio's Influence in Humanities and Social Science Monographs

Historical scholarship is found in various humanities and social science disciplines. Beyond the traditional historically oriented research and scholarship, as vetted by historians trained and educated in the profession, historical scholarship is situated within other disciplinary configurations as well. This essay offers a larger intellectual discussion of historical research and scholarship published in disciplinary venues outside history proper. Using AHCI and SSCI databases, data were collected for book reviews appearing between 1977 and 2006 to ascertain disciplinary and journal affiliations. Historical scholarship is situated in many fields in which a historical perspective or historiographically grounded scholarship is pursued. Indeed, the historical enterprise is much more intellectually pervasive vis-à-vis other disciplines than may be commonly supposed.

Are Two (or Three or Four … or Nine) Heads Better than One? Collaboration, Multidisciplinarity, and Publishability

ABSTRACTAlthough collaborative research has become much more common in the social sciences, including political science, little is known about the consequences of collaboration. This article uses papers submitted to the American Political Science Review to assess whether the widely acknowledged benefits of collaboration produced papers that were more likely to be accepted for publication. The results indicate that collaboration per se made little or no difference, but that the disciplinary configuration of the authors did result in differences in the success of these submissions.

Identifying the Intellectual Contours of a Historical Specialty: Geographical, Temporal, and Subject Emphases of the Journal of the History of Ideas

ABSTRACT The Journal of the History of Ideas was analyzed using the descriptors and subject headings for the articles as indexed in Historical s. A bibliometric approach was used to investigate the evolution and intellectual core of the history of ideas as they revealed disciplinary orientations characteristic of a specialized, yet highly interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, historical subfield. Unlike other areas of historical research, intellectual history is both extremely fluid and dynamic, often incorporating aspects of other fields and melding them into new syntheses and disciplinary configurations.

Analyzing Writing in Academic Disciplines: A few concepts.

The analytic frame presented in this contribution seeks to enable careful, systematic and complex consideration of the various factors that contribute to language use in disciplinary settings across all grade levels. Three key concepts are presented: disciplinary awareness, disciplinary configurations, and writing universes, in which genres and practices interact. Describing the elements of these three concepts leads to a foregrounding of the tensions that student writers must negotiate as they produce language acts in different disciplinary contexts. The contribution bases its exploration of an analytic frame for language activity in the disciplines on insights developed through extended study of the work of apprentice writers and speakers in various settings, studying their interactions with scholastic and disciplinary life through their interaction with and representations of the objects and modes associated with different school subjects.