From Becher, T., & Trowler, P. (2001). Chapter One. "Landscapes, Tribal Territories and Academic Cultures" in Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).
The first edition of this book, published over a decade ago, mapped the territory of academic knowledge at the time and traced the links between the academic disciplines into which that knowledge had coalesced and the cultures of the academics engaged in them. Since then there have been major shifts in the topography of academic knowledge and more significantly, in the very landscape in which it lies: not only in higher education (HE) institutions and systems at the national and international level but also in the socio-economic contexts within which they operate. We can describe these shifts as structural in the sense that, as they occur, there are changes in long-standing sets of practices in different locales among the academic tribes which are the concern of this book.From Anamaria Dutceac Segesten. (2012, December 16). Thinking about Academic Tribes. Retrieved June 30, 2015, from https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/thinking-about-academic-tribes.
The general and global trend has been towards fragmentation/interdisciplinarity and a flourishing of disciplines. There are now very specific fields of inquiry that did not exist 25 years ago, from my own area of specialization, “European Studies”, to “Queer Studies” or “Visual Cultures” or you name it – whichever specific domain that is entitled to define a territory of knowledge with its own boundaries.
