Disciplining Academic Identities: Boundaries and Identity Work among Arts and Sciences Faculty

Abstract

A large body of scholarship shows that even as interdisciplinarity gains recognition, the disciplines remain core aspects of the organization of modern academic life in the United States. We do not yet know, however, how faculty draw on disciplines and disciplinary boundaries in their academic identity work or how they construct their academic identities and convey those identities to others. We explore these questions through 100 in-depth interviews with faculty from 34 arts and sciences disciplines at a private, Research 1 university. We show how boundary battles over symbolic resources associated with disciplines contribute to faculty identity work. We identify four types of identity work arts and sciences faculty use: foregrounding disciplinarity, resisting disciplinary identities associated with administratively assigned departmental homes, emphasizing scientist identities, and pursuing question-oriented identities. Finally, we show how beliefs that disciplinary differences reflect underlying distinctions between “kinds of people” shore up the importance of disciplinary divisions, even in a university setting that provides material support for interdisciplinarity. We use these results to argue that even in institutional settings that provide support for interdisciplinarity, disciplinary boundaries may remain central by providing important symbolic resources.