Why are we an adjective?
If you study field mice, your field is biology and you are a biologist. If you study polymers, your field is chemistry and you are a chemist. If you study muons, your field is physics and you are a physicist. If you study fingerprints, DNA, firearms, fibers, etc., your field is forensic science and you are a …uhm. Wait. Wut.
This might get a tad wonky, but it’s worth it. Buckle up.
Academic disciplines are nouns
An academic discipline or field of study is defined and recognized, in large part, by faculty at universities. The faculty teach, do research in, and provide service to that academic discipline. Learned societies or professional organizations, along with academic journals, help to create the boundaries of each field. No formal criteria exist for classifying an academic discipline, however, and disciplines will vary between universities. For example, anthropology can be found in their own departments, sociology departments, or even humanities departments. A discipline may be broken down into sub-disciplines (Chinese History vs History). Thus, the criteria for organizing knowledge into disciplines are open for discussion.
Nevertheless, anthropology and history are nouns and describe the study of their particular fields. Academia, especially the natural sciences, are all about “things” that make up the natural world. Things, entities, and results are the focus of science, rather than any behaviors or experiments in and of themselves. Yes, science is interested in why the southern grasshopper mouse (Onychomys torridus) is the only carnivorous mouse in North America but only insofar as it is the only carnivorous mouse in North America. Nouns are science’s favorite because they make it easy to separate one thing from another and one discipline from another; this is biology, that is chemistry. Scientists are so fond of nouns that they nominalize verbs and adjectives, turning them into nouns (see what I did there?). They do this because it helps to stuff more information into fewer words (science is complicated) and, here’s a key point, to linguistically reorganize everyday experience into new categories that can be further discussed and elaborated. For example, “A native English-speaking university freshman” takes half the words of “a first-year university student who speaks English as a first language.” The word “repression” can be used Instead of repeating phrases about cells repressing the synthesis of enzymes. The noun can then be considered as a cause that makes another thing “gene expression” possible, as in “Carbon catabolite repression enables the cell to regulate gene expression in response to its metabolic status.” Packing more information into fewer words allows it to be the subject or object of a sentence, with discussions, expansions, and interconnections to other nouns now possible.
Still with me?
Good, because this nominalization literally reconstructs our reality. Processes and events can now become static things to identify and explore. The world is categorized in a new way that challenges and changes our experiences. Processes can now be discussed as things. Making things nouns is central to the control of terms, arguments, and thinking in and about an academic discipline. Naming objects or processes as objects gives the named a status--it exists and the world has changed. Every time the word is used, it reinforces that definition and its existence. Those who use the word properly are in-the-know, knowledgeable enough about it to use the word with authority and accuracy. “By naming something, one actively carves out a space for it to occupy” and, at the same time, pushes out other things that it is not (creation is also exclusionary). Naming takes place in a social context, however, and science is a social endeavor, as is academics. Names are not drawn out of thin air and they bring with them meaning within that context.
Names in academia
Academic disciplines are named territorial boundaries of knowledge and define the conditions of membership in that group. Disciplines are recognized as reflecting reality, the true nature of what has been discovered, studied, and named. The named disciplines therefore create the courses, degrees, programs, and, in many cases, the jobs related to that discipline. Defining a discipline (nominalizing it) means keeping the things a group identifies as being a part of it and cutting out those it does not (“Chemistry”). The faculty, the ones in academia who name things, therefore have the power to exclude or include other individuals by the act of calling them by disciplinary title (“Chemist”). An academic discipline demands discipline, the policing of who is whom and gets to do what.
What happens when two or more groups want the same noun? The boundaries of knowledge need to be negotiated between whoever makes the claim, along with the perceptions of the nouns and, critically, who gets to name things. If everybody decides they own it, then there’s trouble. If one group wants to redefine themselves, like chemistry did from alchemy by cutting out some questionable concepts, there will still be conflict. When a group of practitioners tries to identify itself as a discipline from outside of academia is where it gets interesting.
Isn’t this supposed to be about forensic science*?
Forensic (adjective) science* (noun) was not always the preferred phrase for the profession. The original word was kriminalistik, a German word invented by Hans Gross (1847–1915), an investigative magistrate. Gross wrote the first textbook on crime scene investigation, Handbuch fur Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik (Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook for Magistrates, Police Officers and Lawyers) in 1899. Gross’ book was written in plain language and was meant as a manual for those who needed to investigate and adjudicate crimes. The book included psychology, social behaviors, criminal profiling, chemistry, physics, botany, ciphers, and microscopic examination of “dust,” what would now be called trace evidence. Gross coined the word kriminalistik to describe the sciences as applied to criminal investigations and separate it from criminology, the study of crime as a social phenomenon.
In the United States, the work of August Vollmer did much to professionalize policing. Appointed the police chief of Berkeley, California, Vollmer worked with the University of California Berkeley to create a training program for police, tying it to academic education. Vollmer was influenced by Gross’ book and recognized the potential of science in aiding investigations. His agency was the first in the U.S. to hire a full-time scientist to analyze evidence. Paul Kirk (1902–1970), a faculty member at UC Berkeley, created a major in criminalistics, translating the word kriminalistik to English, later becoming the department’s Chair. Kirk, like Vollmer, became influential in advising other institutions about creating their own programs, both in criminology and criminalistics.
Criminalistics was meant to describe those sciences* developed solely for policing applications. Nobody in academia studied bullets, fingerprints (yes, anthropologists did, but not in this way), shoe prints, or other forensic applications of science. Identifying body fluids, like blood, or drugs came from “other” sciences, like biology or chemistry. Having started in California, the word criminalistics migrated eastward but was not universally adopted. The adjective forensic (from the Latin for “of the forum” meaning public or legal) was also used to describe the sciences* and the sciences used in criminal investigations. The use of the noun criminalistics peaked around 1970 and was supplanted by the adjective-noun forensic science. Equally popular, to the chagrin of some professionals, the adjective “forensic” was nominalized (and pluralized) as “forensics,” being a catch-all word for all of the sciences(*). Forensics took off around the time when Forensic Files (1996) and CSI (2000) became the rage (-shudder-). Although popular, “forensics” (a noun, mind you, although plural) didn’t catch on academically.
Forensic science* in academia (kinda)
Despite 52 accredited programs (some at the same institution) and an unknown number of unaccredited programs in forensic science*, only a few are actually in DEPARTMENTS of forensic science*, the majority being programs or tracks in existing departments or schools (More on forensic science* education in a future posting).
Why this matters
In academia, the basic unit is the Department, which is the smallest element which has a corporate life of its own. A Department normally has:
An administrative existence, that is, a designated leader and a separately accounted budget.
A physical existence, such as offices, laboratories, and other facilities, and
An academic existence, a range of courses offered, degrees awarded, and research conducted.
Faculty, that is, members of the department
The boundaries that define a department are financial, physical, and academic (disciplinary knowledge domain boundary). The domain boundaries are the result of history, vested interest, financing, entrepreneurial opportunity, or of academic coalitions. Those disciplines that have been around longer and are more established, like law, medicine, and chemistry tend to be more conservative about their identities; for example, the name of the department is likely to be traditional (“Chemistry,” not “Chemical and Physical Science Applications”). And, to tie in where this started, they tend to be nouns, defined things with financial, physical, and domain boundaries.
Boundaries delimit the territorial range of the discipline. They keep members in and Those Non-Members out. What is taught to novices (students) defines the discipline; without boundaries, without a home, a discipline does not really exist for academia. Avoiding the whole “basic vs applied” science slog (which has been nicely addressed, thank you), forensic science* is seen as merely applied chemistry, merely applied biology. Therefore, the forensic science* curriculum gets tucked under “real” departments because academia largely does not recognize forensic science* as its own domain. Departments are more likely to absorb new topics rather than (perceptually or actually) cede ground to them. Because forensic science* typically does not exist as a department, that means it is not a noun, a thing unto itself, its own science, recognized by academia. It is an adjective, a subset of some other, real science. Without this recognition, the discipline and the profession lose status and become prey to be “captured” by other domains.
Why are we an adjective and not a noun?
Good question. Forensic science started among the learned in the university sciences and was then brought into the policing domain (a fascinating story for another post). Once inside, other sciences* were developed, based on a variety of observations, assumptions, and methods as a bricolage, a construction made of a diverse range of things that happen to be available. Forensic science* is therefore a syncretic discipline, one that combines portions of different domains and various schools of thought. For good or bad, it is not always seen as a science, as its own discipline, but only as a toolbox filled with other sciences’ methods.
Where do we go from here? This post has already ventured into TL;DR range. But, the main point is, it lays the groundwork for understanding the complex and continuing story of what is forensic science*, where it came from, how that changed what it is and could be, and what do we as scientists, practitioners, and stakeholders do to improve it (and maybe get rid of the asterisk).
Thanks for sticking with this. More to come.