Symposium Group I ideas

Hey Unis,

Here is a brief summary of the Group I ideas.

Group I Description:

Our group aims to describe the factors influencing culture and specialization within cultures, including language, regional, and discipline-specific influences. If you’d like to join our group, think about ways you can describe the factors that affect culture formation and the reasons why we create cultural or specialization divisions.

Here is a summary of our notes from the first meeting (brainstormed):

1) Define culture
– tools you use to investigate/describe/solve problems
– elements of culture:
– identity
– language
Book: Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn- Carlos, could you follow up with this?
– paradigm defined by people in it, what they’re looking at
– isolation of a particular field
– Why do people draw dichotomies? – Drew, could you follow up with this?
– value of specialization and practical use of categorization
– Why do we study?
– academic vs. non-academic
– “less practical” vs. practical applications of knowledge
– natural philosophy —> science
– “Western” philosophy
– continual process – changing classifications of fact vs. speculation
– microcultures

2) Possible structure for Presentation
– history
– phylogeny
– microcultures

segue from the definition of culture and the elements therein to focus on specialization and microcosms of culture within the umbrella structure

I hope this will spark some thoughts! Feel free to post directly to the blog with comments/ideas/suggestions/presentation ideas, or feel free to email me at anna.brown@duke.edu as well. I also have an email list with all of the members of Group I, which I have posted below in case you’d like to contact the other members in our group.

Take care,

Anna

Here are the emails of everyone in Group I:

anna.brown@duke.edu,
Carlos <cm136 [ at ] duke.edu>,
cjw22 [ at ] duke.edu,
David Honig <david.honig [ at ] duke.edu>,
Drew Marticorena <drew.marticorena [ at ] duke.edu>,
pdm6 [ at ] duke.edu