Goodreads Librarians Group discussion
Archived
>
Genre hierarchy under non-fiction for X-Studies
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
"Cultural studies" sounds like a good choice to me.
I'm not terribly familiar with Cultural Studies, but the first thing Wikipedia tells me is:Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and Marxist literary criticism. It generally concerns the political nature of contemporary culture, as well as its past historical precedents, conflicts, and issues. It is, to this extent, largely distinguished from cultural anthropology and ethnic studies in both objective and methodology.
That sounds like a separate field from any of the others to me. It also looks like it has separate academic departments in universities which offer it along with the other interdisciplinary fields listed.
How about Sociology: Here's Wikipedia's list of topics
# 6 Scope and topics
* 6.1 Culture
* 6.2 Criminality, deviance, law and punishment
* 6.3 Economic sociology
* 6.4 Environment
* 6.5 Education
* 6.6 Family, gender, and sexuality
* 6.7 Health and illness
* 6.8 Internet
* 6.9 Knowledge and science
* 6.10 Media
* 6.11 Military
* 6.12 Political sociology
* 6.13 Race and ethnic relations
* 6.14 Religion
* 6.15 Social networks
* 6.16 Social psychology
* 6.17 Stratification
* 6.18 Urban and rural sociology
* 6.19 Work and industry
Any good? Family gender and culture are there anyway..
No, sociology is also a separate department. These are interdisciplinary fields which include sociology and other academic areas but which by definition don't fall exclusively into any of them.(Here's one example of an academic program:
Students who wish to complete the requirements for the undergraduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies must take [several courses, of which] at least one must be taken in each of three broad disciplinary areas: social science, humanities, and science.That doesn't fall under sociology or social science!)
I know that most people aren't going to care how academic genre hierarchies are set up, but the people who are actually going to use them are exactly the ones who will notice if they're misplaced.One solution that I have been thinking about is to stop considering these as academic fields entirely and instead to place them with the concept studied. So, gender studies under gender, disability studies under disability, etc. That would make them harder to find from an "I'm looking for a non-fiction area of study" angle but perhaps easier to find from an "I'm looking for books related to X" angle.
Women's studies tends to fall under "arts and humanities" at colleges. But I didn't think many people would think to look under "arts and humanities" unless they were reading those books for a degree.
I like Cait's idea (msg7). It seems like more people would look for "books related to X" and if looking for "non fiction area of study" bombed as a search the "books related to" would be a logical next step.
Why not just group these under academic? There is already an "academic" label that had been tagged as a genre but wasn't in the hierarchy due to the lack of a parent (I've now made it a child of non-fiction). That would work better than a general non-fiction and would save the trouble of coming up with a needlessly complex label like "interdisciplinary studies" which no one is using as a tag anyway.
Mod
Academic is a broad enough umbrella, as long as we're careful not to overload it. Things like history or psychology could be academic or they could be more general.
Academic is not a subject category.Cultural Studies was probably the best suggestion. (I would ignore Wikipedia's rather specific definition of it, since Goodreads isn't attempting to be that specific or correct.)
Mod
Why? Remember, we're less looking at what a formally-trained MLS would call it, and more for what will help GR users find the books they are looking for.
Academic refers to anything studied in a school setting. It could be humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, math, etc. It refers more to a pedagogical or research intent in the text.
Mod
Agreed. What I don't understand is why that wouldn't apply to the genre examples Cait listed in the first post.
Lobstergirl wrote: "Cultural Studies was probably the best suggestion. (I would ignore Wikipedia's rather specific definition of it, since Goodreads isn't attempting to be that specific or correct.)"But we are attempting to sort genres which are user-created, not to create our own, so the best definition should be coming from the use of the genre shelves. All of the popular Cultural Studies books do appear to be "critical/Marxist theory concerning the political nature of contemporary culture". None of the popular Cultural Studies books overlap with any of the top books in the other -Studies genres. Of the top five books under Cultural Studies, none of those books have any of the other -Studies listed in the first page of their shelves. The people actually using a cultural-studies shelf -- the ones who presumably care the most about how it is placed with other genres -- are apparently not using it as a catch-all, and we can't make a genre mean something else just because its name is handy.
My two cents:1) Let's not use the shelf 'academic' - I think that is too broad a brush, and isn't actually a genre, as someone else stated. Academic research/work is done on every possible subject, as Lobstergirl mentioned.
2) I minored in Women's Studies in university myself, and I would never even remotely think to look under a heading called 'cultural studies' - combine that with the fact that it already has an accepted definition, to me means that we should not be using it as an umbrella term for other types of work.
3) I favor Cait's idea in message 7 - place each of these with the concept studied. I think it is much more likely for those looking for it to be able to find it that way.
I agree with Carolyn (and Cait). It's important to remember that these genres are user driven not, as far as I understand, created categories to suit a more formal if you will structure that no one apparently is/would use.
Okay, I've shuffled the genres around a bit so that none of the original -studies genres are directly under non-fiction anymore.(There isn't a way to see a hierarchical view of all of the genres, is there?)
Cait wrote: "(There isn't a way to see a hierarchical view of all of the genres, is there?) "Not that I've noticed. That would be nice to have. I've had to look at the entire genre list and backtrack several times.
Just want to thank you all for putting so much thought into this! Placing the studies under the concept studied makes a lot of sense.
My inclination is to leave them directly under non-fiction, but Mayanka is worried that for a high-level genre it's getting too cluttered and specific. Any thoughts?