Paper long abstract:

As a concept, the scientific discipline seems to have gone out of fashion in STS. Concepts such as research fields, epistemic cultures, etc. have taken its place. While disciplines are only in rare cases theorized and employed as conceptual referents for empirical studies, the notion of discipline still occurs in passing. Typically, talk of disciplines refers to them in plural, emphasizing what happens across their boundaries or what separates one discipline from another. Thus, it seems to be difficult - or perhaps undesirable - to get rid of the notion of discipline altogether although scholars argue that current research occurs predominantly in more muddled and heterogeneous fields that do not fit neat categorizations. Is discipline nothing but a foil? If so, what would be appropriate concepts that can take its place? If not, what epistemic weight does discipline carry? How can it be rendered productive to better understand the development of novel research fields? This paper will first review concepts of scientific discipline that have been put forward throughout the decades. It will then explore the case of nanotechnology to address the question of how this emerging field of research can be characterized in terms of disciplines or related concepts. The paper draws on a qualitative study, conducted by the author and a small team, investigating how nanotechnology is configured as a novel research field in Swiss academe. The results will be placed in the context of recent work on the (inter)disciplinary constitution of nanotechnology by Bensaude-Vincent, Marcovich, Shinn, etc.