What is a Field? And Do We Want to Work in It?

TO BE CONFIRMED IN OCTOBER

The word "field-work" was coined in the mid 18th-c to name the activity of collecting statistics or conducting research out of doors. By the early 19th century, the term had migrated from activities we now associate with the cadastrization of the land and beaurocratization of the nation state to refer specifically to military fortifications built by soldiers in the battlefield. As we come to understand how the formation of modernism is embedded in colonialism and the rise of the nation state, and how the discipline of art history, too, is a product of modernist systems of knowledge and classifications of culture framed by imperialist assumptions, might we now pause to ponder the military, imperial roots of the way we continue to frame our discipline and to carve it into fields? What do these categories enable, and what do they repress? Whose systems of knowledge do they continue to empower, and whose voices do they forcibly silence? As we begin to decolonize our institutions, and to question literalist demands for evidence, positivist norms and classificatory exclusions, might we seek to probe our disciplinary structures, and to question what and whom they are seeking to discipline?