‘What Does Your Discipline Look Like and How Does It Matter?’ Historians and Physicists Talk

Abstract

This is the first of three chapters reporting and discussing findings from our research interviews with university physicists and historians. This chapter focuses on their perceptions of disciplinary fields as forms of knowledge. Their responses reiterate some of the differentiating characteristics of vertical compared with horizontal knowledge fields as well as some strong disciplinary identifications with their respective fields, and belief in its value both as a specialist field and as a more general education and vocational foundation. In terms of the changing nature of their fields, physicists were more aware of endogenous changes, and historians more concerned with exogenous ones, part..