Four elements you can apply to any area of knowledge or theme. They are a set of questions to ask, not a set of facts to learn, and they are always taken in this order.
What this area of knowledge is about, what problems it takes as its own, and where its questions stop being answerable by its methods. Scope is where you examine why a discipline exists at all and what it deliberately leaves to others.
4 knowledge questions · 6 linked concepts
Whose viewpoints have shaped this knowledge, which viewpoints have been absent, and how the discipline handles internal disagreement. This element includes the historical dimension: how the standpoint of a field has moved over time.
4 knowledge questions · 6 linked concepts
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.
4 knowledge questions · 7 linked concepts
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.
4 knowledge questions · 5 linked concepts