A key concept for understanding your time in college, and also for enriching and clarifying your thought life in general, is the idea of academic disciplines. Social and cultural historian Joe Moran has defined the term “academic discipline” as “a particular branch of learning or body of knowledge” (2). To unpack this definition, consider the following hypothetical scenarios.

Scenario 1: You live in a part of the world that’s subject to severe storms. Over time, their frequency and intensity appear to be increasing. You begin to wonder why this is happening, what the best response might be, and whether there’s any way to know how the situation will develop.

Scenario 2: You have a favorite author whose novels are deeply meaningful to you. One of your friends reads one of these books and absolutely hates it. You try to explain why this friend should give the author another chance, but then this leads you to wonder: What do I really love about these books, anyway? What’s special about them? Why do they affect me so powerfully? What about this author’s ideas and use of language moves me?

Scenario 3: You’re invited to attend a family meal with a friend from a different cultural background than your own. During the meal, you notice that certain things seem unfamiliar. From the food to the way it’s served to the various family rituals surrounding the event, it’s all significantly different from your own family’s way of doing it. You begin to wonder why your friend and his family do things this way. But then this leads you to wonder about the reason for your family’s customs and rituals surrounding food and meals. Where do such things come from? Why do different families and cultures do things the way they do them—whether regarding food or anything else?

In each of these scenarios, you find yourself asking questions about something you’ve observed or experienced, something that you find interesting, compelling, or important. To put it differently, you’re asking questions about a problem or issue that you’ve noticed, some area of practical, emotional, or theoretical concern where you need more knowledge. This kind of questioning, conducted by groups of people in a higher education setting, is the heart of what goes into making an academic discipline. Each academic discipline revolves around a central question or set of questions, each of which requires a different approach to answering it. The collective effort to answer these questions and address these issues constitutes each academic discipline as its own discourse community.

For learning about storms and evolving weather patterns, you wouldn’t apply the same questions or use the same approach that you’d use to evaluate a novel and understand how it achieves its emotional and artistic effects. You wouldn’t use either of those approaches for understanding a given culture’s rituals surrounding food, eating, and meals. The first area (storms and weather patterns) uses the approach of meteorology and, more broadly, atmospheric science. The second (novels) uses the approach of literary theory. The third (cultural aspects of food and eating) uses the approach of cultural anthropology. Each of these—atmospheric science, literary theory, and anthropology—is an academic discipline.

Putting this all together: As “particular branches of learning or bodies of knowledge,” academic disciplines are ways of organizing learning and producing new knowledge by asking questions and using approaches to answering them that are appropriate to the subject, issue, problem, or phenomenon being studied. They are fields of study that have grown up over very long periods of time—some of them are thousands of years old (though some are very new)—as discrete but interlinked ways to increase our understanding of the world and ourselves.