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Okay so this is decent advice and comment bait but I'm upped on coffee and @ethicsoftech and I are giving a talk about this tomorrow, so I'm gonna jump in.
1: Epistemic diversity is great
2: It can be dangerous to try this while pursuing critical feminist/race/queer scholarship https://twitter.com/Ted_Underwood/status/1296462018891984896
1: Epistemic diversity is great
2: It can be dangerous to try this while pursuing critical feminist/race/queer scholarship https://twitter.com/Ted_Underwood/status/1296462018891984896
(pre-thread note: it can be dangerous to pursue those topics in the humanities and social sciences as well)
As someone who moved from digital design into cultural studies into STS: folks across disciplines love interdisciplinary work (tenure committees are a different story). BUT, they love interdisciplinary work that is structured hierarchically.
Georgina Born called this the “subordination-service” model of power imbalances in interdisciplinary work, where one discipline is placed in service of “rounding out" another, or is situated as the content of another. Folks don't like having epistemological frames threatened.
Work that @ethicsoftech and I did in Critical CS1, for example, was praised by CS practitioners when the humanities was used as "content" for CS questions: like "oh, what an interesting and complex dataset that list of marginalized authors is! Let's viz it."
What, uh, didn't work so well was when *reading* the works of those authors challenged fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions about CS and data visualization. Attempting to negotiate those differences brought power into the "fun, open" space right quick.
Visualizing datasets with women and PoC in them? Great! Reflexively changing research and teaching practices to account for the lives and perspectives of those folks? Anecdotal, anti-scientific, biased, naive, etc etc etc. Things get emotional, and things get personal.
I'm a white dude on the tenure track, I can more or less pack up and remove myself from those situations with little career impact.
But you know who can't? Graduate students in the computational and information sciences who depend upon those same collaborators for funding, support, networking, and mentorship.
There are good folks in CS and IS that will mentor (and, hopefully, fund) critically-oriented students. And I think @Ted_Underwood is absolutely right that there are a thousand interesting research questions down that road. This is not about not doing CS or IS.
But there are also thousands of questions that you will almost certainly not be allowed to ask. And the consequences, as a grad (or even undergrad!) student, for trying to ask those questions can be severe.
And, given the funding disparity between the humanities and STEM, while collaborating humanities scholars can certainly provide emotional support, but when students' in other departments funding comes under attack, there's often little we can do. And it is heartbreaking.
After you get your PhD, hey! Lots more flexibility, career paths, etc. But 4-6 years is a long time to have your identity, research questions, epistemological frames, and validity questioned and attacked.
So I guess in summary, the academy sucks all around. And no matter what discipline or department you go into, try your best to suss out the emotional and material support systems you will have access to, and how secure they really are.
Anyway, come to our (w @ethicsoftech ) @EASST4S_2020 talk to hear all about it but with some theory jargon at the front provided by yours truly.
