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I have a lot of new followers who are historians because of my work on @insurrect_histo. Hello historians! I truly love learning from & working w y'all. I’d like to highlight one thing that is v exciting for me about Insurrect!: we are not into cross-discipline judgement 1/6
I know many of you might be thinking, well neither am I! As a literary & gender studies scholar who works w historians, I have to say: I hear a lot of dismissive responses to cross-disciplinary work & see far too many doctrinaire approaches to working w historical materials 2/6
Why is this a problem? Well, if you haven’t noticed, there is currently a major economic and labor crisis in academia, and holding onto our disciplinary divides will not protect us. We need to be more open about all kinds of methods and theories and ways of reading 3/6
This includes finding ways of being more respectful to researchers and teachers inside and outside of academia. We all need to cite more broadly and think together more. Isolation and closed circles are not the way to solve the painful problems we address in our work. 4/6
The perceived divide in disciplines also has material stakes for our working conditions, who has a liveable wage and who doesn’t. We should stop accepting the scarcity myth that there isn’t room for all of us. The quotidian ways we work together during a crisis matters. 5/6
All of this is an organizing strategy, a way to build a version of higher education that is more liveable and less cruel, and less dependent on gatekeeping. I’d welcome more early Americanists & all readers of Insurrect! to join me in this line of thinking 6/6
