The long read

Permeable worlds and territoriality’

By Ludmilla Jordanova, emeritus professor of history and visual culture at Durham University

One of the costs of professionalisation is the erection of boundaries. Sometimes these are necessarily rigid – everyone knows something about health, some people know a great deal, but the barriers to formal medical qualifications are elaborate and high. Perhaps it is because so many people think they are experts in history and literature that academic practitioners defensively stress forms of training and disciplinary standards, which exist alongside ever-proliferating niche journals and organisations that champion a relatively small area or even the study of a single individual.

These trends are understandable. They manifest themselves when departments discuss their priorities for future posts, and colleagues assert the needs of what is imagined as a patch in need of protection. These forms of concern express not just anxiety about the value – perceived or otherwise – of specific specialisms, but a recognition that those in humanities departments find it so much harder to make a compelling public case for what they do than scientists, for example.

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