Talk:African American studies

message: A lack of understanding of the field. The titles of these departments: Black Studies, Africana Studies, African-American Studies, Pan-African Studies, and Africology, reference departments that are all in the same field. There are no subfields. Some departments of "African American studies" do Caribbean and continental African studies. Some Africana Studies departments do mainly African American studies. It depends on the alignment of the particular department based on the current faculty who run it. Name changes to be more uniformed don't always occur or are sometimes challenged by the college they are housed under. We should merge the two articles "African American Studies" and "Africana Studies" with this in mind. Africologist (talk) 11:39, 2 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sub-field? 

message: :The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 
The result of the move request was: (non-admin closure) MOVED
No opposition here, and the discussion at the MOS supports this style (though there are objections to codifying this level of detail on the policy page).  User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 00:05, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: African-American studies →  – WP:COMMONNAME is without hyphen. This is quite apparent on other websites and ngram, as well as major university programs (e.g. Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Boston University, South Carolina University, etc.) and an academic journal in the field (e.g. Journal of African American Studies). There is also a related MOS discussion. Caorongjin (talk) 23:09, 28 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 28 June 2021 

message: I note 
 18:19, 24 July 2013‎ Schierbecker talk contribs block‎  38 bytes +38‎  Marcus Qwertyus moved page African American studies to African-American studies over redirect: compund adjective
and also that there is discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Hyphenating racial identities (as noted above) which is ongoing. Andrewa (talk) 17:40, 6 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: As an MOS regular, I think this move was correct.  "African-American studies" implies "studies undertaken by African Americans", i.e. "African-American scholarship".  What we have here is actually a phrase meaning "studies about African Americans", with a two-word object of study. It is not normal to hyphenate those in names of fields of study or of degree programs, even when they come first and can look adjectival in structure.  Cf. "an information and data sciences degree", not "an information-and-data-sciences degree"; "the computational mathematics program[me]", not "the computational-mathematics program[me]"; etc.  It's typical to hyphenate compound modifiers in formal writing, but there are always exceptions and we mostly intuit them automatically.  E.g., how often do you see "the civil-rights movement", "a Parkinson's-disease diagnosis", "the law-enforcement field", and so on?  When the leading multi-word phrase is parsed as a unit already by virtually all readers, a hyphen in it becomes unnecessary and even an impediment, though it is not strictly an error.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  14:40, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Post hoc'' comments

message: : what is your brief and neutral statement? At nearly 9,500 bytes, the statement above (from the  tag to the next timestamp) is far too long for  to handle, and so it is not being shown correctly at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/History and geography. The RfC may also not be publicised through WP:FRS until a shorter statement is provided. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:13, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for letting me know, Redrose64. Daniel Power of God (talk) 17:02, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks. Now that I (and others) can see what this is all about, I should point out that per WP:RFCNOT, this is not a WP:RFC matter but WP:MERGE for which special templates exist - these should be placed at the top of all articles involved. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:12, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: That may be my fault. My fear was that a merge request wouldn't get as wide an input as the RfC might, and so I recommended that the RfC might get more attention than the merge request. There may be some alternative ideas that could come out of the RfC as well. Anyway, we can switch to a merge request if you think people won't be okay with this procedure. jps (talk) 00:45, 10 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Early procedural discussion