Dane C. Joseph
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"Recall Tukey's infamous quote: ""The best part of being a statistician is playing in everyone's back yard."" Everyone? Does that include the biologist, economist, and political scientist? Of course. What about the anthropologist or the artist? You bet; especially given the explosion in digital humanities and AI tools. But we still have some big questions to answer. Who is qualified to teach social statistics, biostatistics, or digital humanities? Are they also qualified to teach mathematical statistics? Why or why not? After all, if statistics enters everyone's back yard, then it should be prepared to play nice and respect the resident's practices and desires. If on the other hand, statistics and data science contribute something totally unique to a subject-matter domain—say, technical knowledge rather than substantive knowledge—then don't we want (or even need) the qualified, technical statistician to partner with or assume the primary teaching responsibilities? But this is circular and brings us back to square one where we ask about 'who' is qualified. We can also inquire as to 'what' and 'how' we incorporate disciplines into the statistics classroom. For example, should a social statistics lesson be primarily about social problems or the statistical means to tackle them? Come share."