Discipline and Publish: The Problem with Disciplinary Thinking in the Contemporary Academy

This is a book about what happens inside and outside the contemporary academy, the kind of knowledge it produces within specifically defined disciplines, the limits of that disciplinary specific knowledge, and the usefulness or otherwise of such institutionally sanctioned forms of knowing, particularly when understood against the backcloth of our everyday experience and the rough and tumble of broader social and political life. Against inward looking, narrow, myopic, reactive or defensive forms of academic knowledge production, we hold out the possibility for a more potentially virtuous way of thinking and acting in the academy and in the world beyond academia. We call it ‘ill-disciplined thinking’ and we believe in can have real transformative effects for those who can make a virtue of putting it into practice.