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.

大量的学术研究表明，即使跨学科获得认可，这些学科仍然是美国现代学术生活组织的核心方面。但是，我们还不知道教师在其学术身份工作中如何利用学科和学科界限，或者他们如何构建其学术身份并将这些身份传达给其他人。我们通过对一所私立研究型1所大学的34个艺术和自然科学学科的教授进行100次深入访谈，探讨了这些问题。我们展示了与学科相关的符号资源上的边界之争如何促进教师身份工作。我们确定了身份工作艺术和自然科学教职员工使用的四种类型：前台纪律，抵制与行政分配的部门房屋相关的纪律身份，强调科学家身份，并追求面向问题的身份。最后，我们表明，即使在大学环境中为学科交叉提供物质支持的情况下，学科差异的信念如何反映“不同类型的人”之间的根本区别仍能支撑学科划分的重要性。我们使用这些结果来论证，即使在为跨学科提供支持的机构环境中，学科界限也可能通过提供重要的象征性资源而保持中心地位。