Green College
March 20, 2025, 5:00 pm
Disciplines Through Time: The Creation, Maintenance and Breakdown of Knowledge Boundaries
A Series of Presentations sponsored by the Emeritus College and Green College, 2024-2025 .
Emma Cunliffe (Principal-Elect, Green College) and Donald Fisher (Past-Principal, UBC Emeritus College) are convening a second series at Green College that focusses on disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity and brings together in each session an Emeritus Professor, and established scholar and a doctoral or post-doctoral student to have a conversation about the development and current state of their discipline or field. Mark Vessey and Donald Fisher ran the first series in 2021-2022.
The idea is to bring together scholars who inhabit the same academic discipline or field of study, and are at different points chronologically in their academic careers, to converse about how the boundary separating their knowledge unit from other fields and disciplines has changed through time. The conversation will inevitably morph into a consideration of cross-disciplinary influences and interdisciplinary trends as participants account for changes in the cognitive strength of sub-disciplines and sub-fields. The intent will be to identify underlying reasons for the observed changes and, by the end of the series, to draw some general conclusions about mechanisms of (inter)disciplinary interaction and development, in the spirit—if not necessarily the style—of Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault.
Each session with include three academics and a moderator. The academics will normally come from the following populations: relatively recent retirees who are members of the UBC Emeritus College; Green College Leading Scholars, Members of the Green College Common Room and Green College Alumni who have gone onto an academic career; and, current or recent Resident Members of Green College who are currently post-doctoral or doctoral students at UBC. The format will be conversational where the Moderator asks the three panelists a series of questions about their perspectives.
Dates: March 20, 2025; and April 10, 2025.
Join us virtually or in-person at Green College in the Coach House from 5.00 to 6.30 pm and will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.