From Disciplinary Excellence to Interdisciplinary Collaboration: How Australian Academics Negotiate Competing Knowledge Agendas

This chapter draws on research with historians and physicists to elucidate a bottom-up perspective on two knowledge agendas within research policy and funding mechanisms in Australia. On the one hand the government and universities are concerned with quality and international rankings that are underpinned by disciplinary categorizations and direct and indirect peer review. On the other hand there is a drive to produce greater economic impact and shorter-term utilitarian outcomes, an agenda frequently conflated with a prioritization of interdisciplinarity and collaboration with industry. The chapter shows that the historians and physicists prize their initial disciplinary identity and training and see it as an important foundation for new interdisciplinary work. They are irritated by what they see as rigid top-down forms of research steering and funding and see some of this as counter-productive. In contrast to some policy reports, they do not see disciplinary and interdisciplinary agendas in binary terms but as important sources of mutual renewal, and largely find ways of complying with externally imposed changing agendas without changing their fundamental research commitments.