Map of the Disciplines
Disciplines
HUMANITIES
Philosophy
Objects of Study
Thought itself; ethical or
epistemological or
metaphysical problems in
the world
HUMANITIES:
Interpretive
Literature
Art/Film
Criticism
Art/Film
History
Art objects/literature, often
in the context of historical
documents and other
cultural, biographical, &
historical sources
HISTORY
Evidence of the past:
historical documents,
including journals, reports,
records, newspapers
articles, etc.; anything that
tells you something about
what happened and what
people thought happened,
including images, objects,
interviews
Questions
How do we know what
we know?
Is there absolute
truth/objective reality
outside of us (or inside of
us), or is truth relative?
Is inductive or deductive
reasoning more valuable?
How does this art
work/text make
meaning?
How and why was it
created, and how was it
received?
What about its context
surfaces in it, and what
does it reveal about its
context?
About change over time:
What happened?
Why and how did it
happen?
What did people believe
about what happened—
how did they tell the
story?
What can we tell that
they couldn’t tell, from
our different place in
history?
Research
 The use of logic, dialectic, and reason
to contemplate the forms or the mind,
not the illusions of the physical world
or sensory experience
 Empirical testing of the way given
“truths” work in the everyday dirt of
experience.
Epistemological Assumptions
 We can get to either objective
or workable truths through
reason.
 The most important knowledge
is absolute and objective or
embodied, discursive, and
relative.
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Look, Question, Research, Interpret
Formal/close reading of primary
sources (art works & literature).
Creation of contexts through
collection of primary/secondary
sources: similar and different art
objects and/or evidence that provides
historical, artistic, biographical, and
cultural context

Read, Question, Research, Interpret
Close reading/analysis of massive
quantities of primary historical
documents--focused on
production/reception, deciphering
direct and indirect information and
comparing with other sources,
carefully tested for reliability.
Evaluation of secondary sources—
the historical arguments of other
scholars.
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Ambiguity is not a bad thing,
but valuable.
Artistic, imaginative responses
to lived experience and the
physical world are crucial ways
of knowing, that provide truths
as important as fact.
Art making and interpretation
are ways of understanding these
truths.
The past happened and we can,
with various levels of success
and certainty, get to the facts.
We can’t simply recover the
past; we can make reasoned
explanations through careful
analysis of evidence.
It’s important to be attentive to
silences, power, and the way the
past was influenced by actors’
own narratives.
WOK Course Map, cont.
Discipline/Key
Objects of Study
Terms
People in the midst of their
ANTHROPOLOGY
cultures, and all their
Key terms:
Culture
significations: language,
Cultural relativism
clothing, objects, rituals,
Ethnography
other individual and
Thick description
collective practices;
Qualitative research
people’s own
Participantinterpretations of
observation
themselves and their
Interpretation
cultures
Theory
SOCIOLOGY
Key terms:
Social
Variable
Statistical Analysis
Demography
Quantitative research
Ethnography
Theory
Verifiability
BIOLOGY
Key terms:
Hypothesis
Theory
Skepticism
Objectivity
Model
Positivism
Empirical research
Epigenetics
Verifiability
People in the midst of their
social groups and
dynamics, and the data
about groups and dynamics
that can be gathered by
comparing various factors
across groups, time, and
place.
Natural life, from
microscopic to macroscopic
scales: molecules, cells,
tissues, organs, individual
animals, populations of
animals, communities,
ecosystems, and the
biosphere
Questions
Research
What does this
conversation or practice
mean? What about a given
culture surfaces in this act
of signification or ritual?
What are this culture’s
values? What are its
ambivalences and
contradictions?
How is human (inter-)
subjectivity at play here?
How am I as a researcher
influencing my results?
How does this group’s
behavior compare to other
group’s behaviors?
What is the social aspect
of this phenomenon?
What is the trend?
Which variables correlate?
Which caused the trend?
What are the causes of
inequality?
How did it begin?
How and did it change
over time?
What is it for?
How is it built?
How does it work?
What goes wrong, and
how is it fixed?
Usually qualitative:
Ethnography (participant observation),
interpretive analysis, discussion of
theoretical frameworks, open-ended
interviews, life histories, archival work,
‘thick’ descriptions of events and images
and texts (from literature to court rulings).
When ethnographic methods are used:
Participation/observation is considered
partial and ongoing: goal is dialogue with
subjects, make explicit limitations of
researcher’s position and analysis, discuss
limits of writing and speech
Often quantitative:
Census, survey, questionnaire, controlled
and structured interviews, statistical
analysis, charts & tables, focus groups,
social network mapping, controlled and/or
randomly selected participants (when
possible), Comparative historical,
ethnography. When ethnographic methods
are used, the goal is limitation of factors
and variables that affect observed activity
Gathering observable, empirical,
verifiable evidence through fieldwork
and/or experimentation, to create and test
hypotheses using repeatable steps.
But also: reconstructing the history of
species and predicting the future by
inference from observable evidence;
inferring molecular structures from
chemical and physical knowledge.
Epistemological
Assumptions
 Beliefs and practices are
culturally relative.
 Quantitative studies can
conceal both their
subjective nature and the
truths about culture that
only surface through
interpretation.
 Researchers should
foreground their own
subjectivity.
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2
Society is worthy of
study in its own right;
even the most individual
of acts reveal something
about the social order.
Sometimes: the best
knowledge can be
verified; researchers
should strive to counter
their own bias.
“There is a real world,
independent of human
perception.” (M 34)
The world is “not chaotic
but structured.” (M 34))
There is “historical and
causal continuity among
all phenomenon in the
material universe.” (M
35)
All species evolved from
the same organisms
through natural selection.