What is an Academic Discipline?

An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level.

Different Lenses

Photographers use different lenses for different situations.

Photographers use different lenses for different subjects and conditions. If you’re taking a picture of a soccer player at the other end of a stadium, you’d need a telephoto lens that can also shoot at high speeds. If you’re shooting at night, you’ll need a low-light lens. Underwater photography requires a waterproof setup. And so on.

When you’re thinking about different academic fields or disciplines, it can be useful to imagine them as different camera lenses. Each one offers a different way to capture the world in front of you. Some might zoom in for a closeup (like a close reading of a media object), while others offer a wide-angle view (like demographic data in social science).

Disciplines and Categories

Specific academic disciplines are generally grouped into broader categories that are themselves considered disciplines at a higher level of abstraction. When you lay them out in a table like the one below, you can clearly see what you may have already begun to notice: that at most colleges and universities, major programs of study and the names and structures of academic departments are founded on the divisions among academic disciplines.

Note: none of the categories have clear-cut borders or definitions, and you’ll see some more than others. Your school might have a business school or a department of engineering, for instance, but it probably doesn’t have a department of applied sciences. Also, the placement of disciplines and sub-disciplines will sometimes change depending in the circumstances. Law, for instance, is sometimes included in the social sciences, sometimes in the humanities.

Academic Disciplines and the Questions They Ask

Different disciplines will focus on different aspects of a given problem or situation. Even if they have the same topic, they will ask different questions and prioritize different information.

Let’s take a big problem like global climate change and focus on Alaska. An environmental scientist, a pathologist, an economist, and an anthropologist would raise different kinds of questions about the same problem. The environmental scientist would ask questions like: how much has the water risen since we last checked? How have the increasing temperatures and rising water levels affected the vegetation and animal life? A pathologist would take a different approach: what new diseases have emerged in correlation with global climate change? Economists would ask how global climate change is affecting the economic situation in Alaska. How has the lumber or the fishing industry been affected by global climate change? How has global climate change affected tourism? An anthropologist might ask how global climate change is affecting the ways of life of certain indigenous groups.

The table below illustrates the point about disciplines being founded on questions. It probably goes without saying that this list is hardly exhaustive, as there are hundreds of academic disciplines. The list of questions for each discipline is likewise representative; most disciplines involve a cluster of questions rather than just a single overriding one. For instance, sociologist Andrew Abbott has observed that his own discipline “is organized around an archipelago of empirical questions: race and ethnicity, work and occupations, stratification, population, urban studies, organizations, and so on” (297). The following list can help you begin to understand what it means to say that academic disciplines are organized around fundamental questions.

Examples of core questions from selected academic disciplines

Academic Discipline		Description	Core Questions
Anthropology		The study of human culture, societies, and biology	What makes us human? How do people in different societies dress, eat, communicate, and so on? How can the material remains of past and present cultures help us understand human beings? What biological and social factors have impacted the evolution of humans (and other primates)?
Economics		Study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services	How do nations, governments, businesses, and individuals allocate resources? Are there enduring laws or principles that govern the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services?
History		Study and interpretation of the past	What happened in the past? What’s the meaning of past events? How should we interpret them? What can we learn from them?
Musicology		Study of music	How has music evolved throughout history? What role does music play in human societies?
Physics		Study of the nature, properties, and interactions of matter and energy	How and why does the universe work the way it does? Is there a unified set of laws that governs matter, motion, and energy at different levels of scale?
Sociology		The study of the structures and functioning of human society	How is the individual shaped by society? How do social class, race, gender, and ethnicity affect our experience and worldview?

Using Your Own Questions to Choose a Major

You can make this matter of academic disciplines more personal by realizing that when you select your college major, you’re choosing a specific academic discipline as the focus for the next few years of your life. If you still haven’t chosen a major, you might consider “matching” yourself with one by paying attention to the kinds of questions you’re interested in asking.

Do you find yourself wondering about why people do what they do, and whether it has always been this way? Maybe anthropology or psychology would be a good fit. Are you interested in figuring out how computers work (computer science)? Do you wonder how the government affects the economy (economics)? Do you want to know the best ways to sell things and connect people with the goods and services they want (marketing)? Are you constantly trying to find out how to improve your own health and that of other people (medicine)?

If you’ll recognize the questions you’re interested in asking and choose your major accordingly, then you’ll discover that your college experience not only helps you to answer your questions but to ask them better.

A Note on the Word “Discipline” and What It Means for You

As a final consideration, notice how the word “discipline” carries multiple shades of meaning. In addition to referring to an academic subject area, the word also refers to training, order, and control, as when we talk about disciplining our children, or when we use terms such as “military discipline” and “self-discipline.” It also shares an etymological link to the word “disciple,” defined as someone who becomes a student of someone else by taking that person as a model and mentor. You can see all of these meanings in the word’s Latin origin: “Discipline” comes from disciplina, meaning instruction, teaching, or training. (Disciplina is in turn derived from the verb discere, “to learn.”)

An academic discipline, therefore, is not just a category name or university department title such as biology, mathematics, sociology, business, or religious studies, but a training ground for the mind. When you commit to learning a specific academic discipline, you are committing to being disciplined by it. In learning to ask its questions and adopt its approach to understanding its focal area, you become its “disciple.” Your mind is shaped in a certain way not just by the knowledge that you gain but by the discipline’s specific way of framing and interrogating the world.