Filed under: academia
working in an interdisciplinary field is an exercise in schizophrenia. i find myself constantly defining and negotiating internally the various boundaries that encroach upon my intellectual space. the other night, a friend and i were working through some of these boundary issues and started playing a silly game of “fantasy academic deparment.”
if i could make up my fantasy department, what would it look like how would it be organized? what subject areas would we create to best capture and represent what we think to be the most vital aspects of digital life?
we came up with: political economy of media, cultural life of information, and design. while we clearly saw problems with these broad sweeping categories, we began to struggle even more when we asked ourselves, “what aspects of design would we include? how can we explictly include issues of race, gender, and class? where would those go? and what about history and aesthetics? would we include those as well and how would this fit?”
during all this we got really giddy and giggly and had this epiphany of how interesting it would be to see other people’s fantasy departments. this got us to thinking on the idea of making a fantasy academic league just like those fantasy sports leagues. what if we created a game just for that? people could make up whatever kind of department they wanted, organize it however they wanted and *then* pick any academic or public intellectual of their choosing and began competing against one another! i did a quick google search and found several others who had come up with this idea already, albeit more specifically for academic journals and for law schools.
the trick to this would be then developing metrics and getting data to evaluate these fantasy departments, but everyone could pick at their whim whatever metrics they want. my friend and i came up with a whole bunch of silly ones like google search rank or search hits, lexisnexis hits, conference presentations, etc. however how fun and funny would it be to have this fantasy intellectual labor league and with teams competing with one another? i can’t imagine that anyone aside from grad students would enjoy this, but it think it would be a great commentary on the state of interdisciplinary work in academia more broadly and possibly provide some interesting fodder for evaluation metrics in this interdisciplinary environment. would anyone be interested? would anyone care? would anyone find this as fun and funny as me and my buddy?
