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How can we connect philosophy, religion, or history to an article that does not relate directly to those perspectives?

You can use nearly any disciplinary perspective on nearly any topic (in fact, these tools would be much less useful--and probably wouldn't be included in the academic conversation to the extent that they are--if they only applied to their own domains.)

Applying these perspectives can take two forms:

1. applying the *subject* of a discipline to your subject, or

2. applying the *methods* of a discipline to your subject.

1. Asking how the subject of the perspective applies to your subject

ex: religion x "Intimate Mothering Publics"

"This article is about the practices of mothers seeking parenting and medical advice online. How might religion impact parenting decisions? In what ways might these religious influences determine what kind of advice is sought online? Do parents of different faiths look for different kinds of internet-based advice?"

2. Asking how the methods of that perspective applies to your subject.

ex: history x "Mind the Gap"

"This article is about different demographics making different contributions to wikipedia. The study of history sometimes examines the past through case studies. Can I find case studies on how other encyclopedias have been compiled? The study of history also looks at physical artifacts to understand the past. Can I look at the physical artifact of a print encyclopedia and see how it differs from a digital encyclopedia?"

The articles to which you’re responding probably use disciplinary perspectives as well--good academic writers often use multiple disciplinary lenses (in the same way that a good practitioner of anything uses multiple tools.)

These lenses, when they appear in academic texts, are kind of like theses--all good writers have one, although not all explicitly state it, but academic writers are more likely to state it than others. Writers will often tell you with certain signal phrases like

"this paper will use [X] framework to examine..."

"this paper uses a [X] model to determine..."

"in our research, we applied the work of [some other researcher] to find..."

"the present study employs a [X] approach to the data..."

It may not always be a disciplinary perspective per se, but there will be tools present--no good writer writes in a void.

So, when you find an article using a particular perspective, you can examine that as a way of formulating a response—ask yourself if the author is using the perspective correctly, of if their findings could be understood more thoroughly if you applied a different perspective, etc.