Academic field in the context of "Liberal arts education"

Environmental science is an academic field that integrates the physical, biological, and mathematical sciences to study the environment and solve environmental problems. It uses an integrated, quantitative, and interdisciplinary approach to analyze environmental systems and emerged from the fields of natural history and medicine during the Enlightenment. It is considered interdisciplinary because it is an integration of various fields such as: biology, chemistry, physics, geology, engineering, sociology, and ecology.

Environmental science came alive as a substantive, active field of scientific investigation in the 1960s and 1970s driven by, the need for a multi-disciplinary approach to analyze complex environmental problems, the arrival of substantive environmental laws requiring specific environmental protocols of investigation, and the growing public awareness of a need for action in addressing environmental problems. Events that spurred this development included the publication of Rachel Carson's landmark environmental book Silent Spring along with major environmental issues becoming public, such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, and the Cuyahoga River of Cleveland, Ohio "catching fire", also in 1969.

Cultural studies is an academic field that explores the dynamics of contemporary culture (including the politics of popular culture) and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes.

Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is avowedly, and even radically, interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and participate in the construction of their everyday lives.

Scholarly peer review or academic peer review (also known as refereeing) is the process of having a draft version of a researcher's methods and findings reviewed (usually anonymously) by experts (or "peers") in the same field. Peer review is widely used for helping the academic publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief, the editorial board or the program committee) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected for official publication in an academic journal, a monograph or in the proceedings of an academic conference. If the identities of authors are not revealed to each other, the procedure is called dual-anonymous peer review.

Academic peer review requires a community of experts in a given (and often narrowly defined) academic field, who are qualified and able to perform reasonably impartial review. Impartial review, especially of work in less narrowly defined or inter-disciplinary fields, may be difficult to accomplish, and the significance (good or bad) of an idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries. Peer review is generally considered necessary to academic quality and is used in most major scholarly journals. However, peer review does not prevent publication of invalid research, and as experimentally controlled studies of this process are difficult to arrange, direct evidence that peer review improves the quality of published papers is scarce. One recent analysis of randomized controlled trial abstracts found that editorial and peer review processes led to substantive improvements between submission and publication.

In mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean ( /ˌærɪθˈmɛtɪk/ arr-ith-MET-ik), arithmetic average, or just the mean or average is the sum of a collection of numbers divided by the count of numbers in the collection. The collection is often a set of results from an experiment, an observational study, or a survey. The term "arithmetic mean" is preferred in some contexts in mathematics and statistics because it helps to distinguish it from other types of means, such as geometric and harmonic.

Arithmetic means are also frequently used in economics, anthropology, history, and almost every other academic field to some extent. For example, per capita income is the arithmetic average of the income of a nation's population.

Comparative literature studies is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative literature "performs a role similar to that of the study of international relations but works with languages and artistic traditions, so as to understand cultures 'from the inside'". While most frequently practised with works of different languages, comparative literature may also be performed on works of the same language if the works originate from different nations or cultures in which that language is spoken.

The characteristically intercultural and transnational field of comparative literature concerns itself with the relation between literature, broadly defined, and other spheres of human activity, including history, politics, philosophy, art, and science. Unlike other forms of literary study, comparative literature places its emphasis on the interdisciplinary analysis of social and cultural production within the "economy, political dynamics, cultural movements, historical shifts, religious differences, the urban environment, international relations, public policy, and the sciences".

An academy of sciences is a type of learned society or academy (as special scientific institution) dedicated to sciences that may or may not be state funded. Some state funded academies are national, or royal (i.e. United Kingdom's Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge) as a form of honor.

The other type of academies are Academy of Arts or combination of both (e.g., American Academy of Arts and Sciences).Academy of Letters is another related expression, encompassing literature.In non-English-speaking countries, the range of academic fields of the members of a national Academy of Science often includes scholarly disciplines which would not normally be classed as "science" in English. Many languages use a broad term for systematized learning which includes both natural sciences and social sciences and fields such as literary studies, linguistics, history, or art history. (Often these terms are calques from Latin scientia (the etymological source of English science) and, accordingly, derivatives of the verb 'know', such as German Wissenschaft, Swedish vetenskap, Hungarian tudomány, Estonian teadus or Finnish tiede.) Accordingly, for example the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften), the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia), or the Estonian Academy of Sciences (Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia) also cover the areas of social sciences and humanities.

Genocide studies is an academic field of study that researches genocide. Genocide became a field of study in the mid-1940s with the work of Raphael Lemkin, who coined genocide and started genocide research, and its primary subjects were the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the primary subject matter of genocide studies, starting off as a side field of Holocaust studies, and the field received an extra impetus in the 1990s, when the Bosnian genocide and Rwandan genocide occurred. It is a complex field which lacks consensus on definition principles.