2000, Structures Arrangement of Matter and Meaning

The organizational theme of this year's Institute is "Structure: Arrangements of Matter and Meaning." This topic has been chosen to build upon inter-campus initiatives and discussions pertaining to interdisciplinarity. The concept of structure is both central in a wide range of disciplines and highly variable in its applications. Sociologists, for example, use the notion of structure to talk about relations between classes, castes, and other social groups, while neuroscientists use structure to describe the human brain and how it works. Similarly, a literary theorist might point to structures of rhetoric and narrative in pursuing textual analysis, while an economist might rely on market structures to explain unemployment rates and a musicologist might compare structures of melody, harmony, and tonality. Identifying or imaging arrangements that give form to the natural, social, symbolic, material, and cultural worlds appears to be a disciplinary constant. But structure also applies to disciplines, as well as to their particular subject matter. Understanding how analytic frameworks, research practices, and institutional organizations structure disciplinary knowledge is thus an important starting point for discussions of interdisciplinarity.