Taking its interdisciplinary heritage seriously: The future of Religious Studies in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article will argue that Religious Studies is not a narrowly defined discipline with a single methodology but is an area or field of study that is interdisciplinary in nature. From the beginning, Religious Studies as a scholarly field has engaged a variety of disciplinary approaches including: literary analysis of scriptural texts, history of religions, comparative religion, philosophy of religions, psychology of religions, sociology of religions and anthropology of religions. This has been its strength in the past, providing ways to reach out to other disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Taking its interdisciplinary heritage seriously today gives Religious Studies a strong basis from which to move forward into the future. It enables Religious Studies departments to build bridges to cognate departments resulting in joint appointments and enriched programs for students. It widens Religious Studies' base of support and regard within the academic community. It fosters research projects with interdisciplinary team approaches to contemporary problems in areas such as biomedical ethics, environmental ethics, religion and peace-building, pluralism and public policy—global issues that transcend the ability of any one discipline to provide answers. This approach ensures that the knowledge developed by Religious Studies "has a place at the table" alongside the other disciplines and is engaged in the solving of major problems and the formation of policy recommendations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".