Reply To: September 8th: History, Conservation and politics, the example of Australia

Nik Petek
Reply to Nisa Dedić

There are various forms of imperialism and i don’t think it needs to be geographical. All we need to do is look into academia and we see that quantitative disciplines (e.g. the hard sciences) have become the dominant disciplines at most research and learning institutions. Before World War II, the arts and humanities were just as interesting to people, and were considered in many ways noble. But the “noble” connotations might come from the fact that only the better off people could afford to study such degrees, whereas the other social classes would study the sciences to secure a job later on (I think left-overs of this are still present in the UK). The humanities, arts, and sometimes also social sciences are being discriminated against in funding and in terms of how much attention they receive from the public and the media. Science has taken over the role of the dominant academic branch. In a discussion between social science+humanities+arts vs. science+math, the hard sciences will be given preference in most spheres of life, also because they are the ones advancing technological change which brings profits. From here we come to another imperialism, where science is dominated by the market and what people and the market wants. That is, science has to research what the grants are designed for. As one of my former professors said, there is less and less space for any researcher to conduct research that he/she is interested in.