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1) I will try to make something constructive out of this dispute. The moral of the story is: sectarian approaches to discipline are mostly destructive and obsolete. ... https://twitter.com/AaronRHanlon/status/1316711627018862593
2) Theater vs. 'literature' might seem an obvious example of where disciplinary sectarianism makes sense, but poetry is often designed for sound and performance. I mean, even *the novel* was once read aloud in the home (see Abigail Williams' excellent _The Social Life of Books_)
3) The point is one could justifiably design courses with different remits to cover aspects of all of these genres, not just drama, and it's OK to cover part of a thing from one area of expertise while another area handles another part. Knowledge is difficult and there's a lot ..
4) But the point is actually much larger than this dispute in a small corner of academic life. It extends to all disciplines. Take, for example, economics. ...
5) Nearly every economics course implicitly draws on expert knowledge in human psychology. Many in public policy. Many in relatively advanced mathematics. If they're astute, history too. Morson & Schapiro even made the case for literature in econ: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691176680/cents-and-sensibility
6) The more you unravel the *implicit* relationships between disciplinary remit in virtually every course under the sun, the harder it is to justify this or that as sole territory of x.
7) The institutional pressures we face drive us toward territorial approaches to knowledge. Territorial approaches to knowledge are a bad way to pursue knowledge. They're also obsolete, in the sense that they've served their historical purpose of building up e.g. 'the humaniites'
8) and the sciences into silos of specialists who don't work together. And within those silos more silos. This is all artificial, in the sense that it's a heuristic that serves institutional organization, not knowledge production or teaching & learning.
9) So I'm (obviously?) sympathetic to people's negative reactions to the pressures such destructive institutional heuristics inflict on us. But in my view that's not a reason to reify disciplinary divisions that aren't epistemically sound. /end
