What this week’s reading stimulates me to think about is the problem of dualism: what does it really imply? And when do dualisms matter?

“Dualism,” according to the scholar Costall, “is institutionalized within the structure of our academic disciplines. On the one hand, there are the natural and the engineering sciences, and, on the other, the human or social sciences” [1]. In addition to that, he also mentions that interdisciplinary efforts, as a response to this kind of dualism, often fail because “they either fracture along the old divide or else retreat to the side of ‘hard science’” [1], [2].

In this week’s reading, Chuh also tackles this problematic division between “hard sciences” and humanities – a division that has been built into the structure of traditional, educational institutions. As Chuh writes,

“Now, with concerted emphasis on STEM fields deemed necessary to success and national competitiveness in the global workforces, outcomes towards and relevance to those goals serve as primary measures of institutional performance. It is thus that it seems necessary to defend the humanities as a means of resisting the rationality that authorizes and resources certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of others” [3].

As one can see, the structural dualism between “hard sciences” and humanities in the end disconnects what and how we experience the world (i.e., who we are) from what has been taught.

Chuh’s suggested solution to this dualism is kind of pessimistic in the way that she communicates it; as she writes, “we can at the least stop submitting to its demands as we claim the humanities as a ground for bringing forth sensibilities that grapple with rather than cover over its constitutive violence” [3]. To put it in another way, by stopping submitting to this structural dualism that gives more power to one kind of knowledge than to the other kind of knowledge, we can just let humanities be humanities rather than “a means of resisting the authority of sciences” and therefore, sciences can just be sciences rather than something that has been overestimated or underestimated. 

Reference

[1]       A. Costall, “Socializing Affordances,” Theory Psychol., Aug. 2016, doi: 10.1177/0959354395054001.
[2]       C. Kwa, “Representations of Nature Mediating between Ecology and Science Policy: The Case of the International Biological Programme,” Soc. Stud. Sci., vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 413–442, 1987.
[3]       K. Chuh, “Knowledge under Cover,” in The Difference Aesthetics Makes, Durham : Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 26–50.