Glossary

Term	Definition	Illustration
Concepts	Mental models or explanations, sets of ideas about how things work.	Hegemony is a concept that explains how some members of a society exercise power through coercion and persuasion, gaining the consent of those who have less power by persuading them to "buy into" ideas that may not benefit the less powerful. Hailing is a concept that explains how readers or viewers of a text can be led to feel that the text "speaks to them" through textual elements that directly address their interests or perspectives.
Discipline	Academic fields "Members" of a discipline usually share concepts, materials, methods, frameworks, and knowledge	As a discipline, English is concerned with the production and interpretation of literary texts, including fiction, essays, drama, poetry, and film. Literary scholars draw on a shared vocabulary about authorship, imagery, the use of language, literary forms, and so on, as well as shared knowledge of the history of literature, theories of literature, and familiarity with a common body of texts. Sociologists draw on a shared set of ideas about how societies and individuals connect, methods for gathering data about human behavior and ideas, methods for analyzing qualitative and quantitative data, theories that explain human behavior, and knowledge of key studies, processes, and theories.
Framework	The structure of knowledge, an awareness of the relationship between the elements in a discipline	The study of history, for example, is usually organized by time periods, and historians share a common language and some common knowledge of what was happening during each period. In addition, historians have a sense of the various factors that shaped historical trends and events. So given a specific document, they would immediately position it in an historical framework, considering how it might connect with other documents from that period, major issues of the period, and so on. An historical framework also includes ideas about what kinds of information various types of documents offer, so when historians look at letters, their framework includes a set of characteristics that usually apply to letters, but they might also look closely at a specific letter to figure out where it fits within the larger category of letters.
Interdisciplinary Analysis	Integrating concepts, materials, and methods from multiple fields into an analysis.	An interdisciplinary scholar interested in work might consider what people say work means to them, as expressed in a variety of media and art, but he would also want to explore how work has changed over time and how it shapes the patterns of daily life and has been shaped by patterns of technological change. At the same time, he might want to consider analyses of how work contributes to social stratification, the development of group affiliations, a sense of self, and cultural values. Big questions about culture almost always benefit from such multifaceted explorations. Interdisciplinarity is rarely a small-scale activity, and working with materials, methods, and concepts from multiple fields doesn't tend to yield simple, clear answers. Interdisciplinary questions are, almost by definition, questions that yield complex and multiple answers. Different disciplines and approaches uncover different aspects of a common question, and to a large extent interdisciplinarity happens when we pay attention to how those different perspectives complement and contradict each other.
Knowledge	The integrated collection of concepts and information that someone understands	Disciplinary knowledge refers to the framework, methods, and information that members of a discipline share. People working within a discipline can usually expect that their peers use certain terms in the same way, that they all use common concepts in more or less the same way, that they speak the same language and live in the same disciplinary culture. In literary studies, for example, most scholars know the approximate time periods, themes, and significant contributions of many individual writers, as well as how literature developed and changed during major periods and something about the characteristics of various literary movements. They also share a vocabulary of terms, such as prosody, voice, narration, motif, and so on.
Materials	The sources that scholars in a discipline use	Sociologists look at what people say and how they behave as their primary materials. Geographers study maps and demographic data. Historians look at documents of all kinds. Art historians look at works of art as well as at what was written about them.
Method	The tasks and processes that scholars use to analyze data	Literary scholars and historians engage in close reading. Sociologists use mathematical formulas to test the validity and significance of statistics. Anthropologists use observation and ethnographic interviewing.
Questions	Inquiry into a subject that leads scholars to investigate materials and apply methods; what we don't know but want to know	Why do some texts become popular? What do audiences do with popular texts? How do popular narratives influence individuals and the society? Does violence on television lead to violent behavior?
Understanding	The ability to use knowledge, to apply what you know to new situations and problems	By the end of this course, you'll demonstrate your understanding of interdisciplinary analysis and popular narratives by applying your understanding to your own analysis of a popular text.