Saturday, June 27, 2009

Focussing in an interdisciplinary world

I am an engineer by training, but I have studied (and still do study) languages and gender/queer theory.  When I told one of my highly respected professors that I was considering teaching as a career, she told me that I must choose my discipline and stick to it.  I must either be an engineer or a social scientist or a linguist, if I wanted to be taken seriously.  Yes, she does have a point.  One must specialize in an area to develop one's skills and reputation.  On the other hand, however, I fear that her narrow (not narrow-minded) approach to research and academia pervades too much of today's culture.  The engineers know little about the humanities, the scientists know little about the arts, and our educational system has mechanisms to keep these artificial barriers in place.

Now how does this relate to asexuality?  The understanding of one's own identity--whether sexual, gender, racial, etc.--is an intrinsically personal process of deep introspection.  During times of such introspection, one often seeks out information to learn more about the history and current state of people with identities similar to one's own.  This seems "natural" and "applicable" to one's own studies when one is a social scientist.  When one is involved in more "technical" professions, understanding one's identity and--gasp!--talking about the theory behind one's own identity culture is often viewed as "soft" or "taboo".  

So I'm curious.  For those of you who either identify as asexual or are active in the asexual/AVEN community, how passionate are you about learning more about your identity, how it relates to the community, and how the community relates to other socio-historical movements?  And if you care to share, what is your profession or major area of study?  
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2 comments:

  1. ACHJune 27, 2009 at 6:16 PM

    Specialization goes a lot deeper than that. Syntacticians often have little idea of phoneticians are doing, who have little clue what semanticisms are doing. Even within a field, overcoming these problems is a real challenge, so that related fields studying the same things often have little clue about the insights that can be found in those other fields studying the same things, but from different perspectives.

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  2. CarsonspireJune 27, 2009 at 7:26 PM

    You're absolutely right, pretzelboy. Specialization does go much deeper than that. I was keeping my description broad for the sake of perspective.

    Your example brings up a good point about communication. It is not necessarily the case that each person in their respective field does not care about what the other person is doing, but rather that they are so immersed in their own subject matter that they lose sight of the larger picture. What is so ironic about this is that if these people were to work together or at least talk to one another about their research, they might actually make new discoveries about their work that they wouldn't otherwise have made, had they stayed within the boundaries of their special topic.

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