This paper identifies what can be called the 'paradox of interdisciplinarity' (Weingart 2000) in Australian higher education research governance and explores some of its constitutive dimensions. In the Australian context, the paradox of interdisciplinarity primarily concerns the proliferation of a programmatic discourse of interdisciplinarity in government reports and government policy and strategy documents, often tied to notions of innovation and applicability, parallel to the persistence or even reinforcement of modes of governance and associated mechanisms that almost exclusively rely on rigid discipline-based classification systems to evaluate and fund research. Two interrelated dimensions of this apparent paradox are discussed. First, the conceptions of knowledge that underpin the use of notions of disciplinarity as well as interdisciplinarity in Australian government reports and policy and strategy papers are analysed. Second, an analysis of the Australian research governance system and its underlying mechanisms is presented, as they pertain to interdisciplinary forms of research. On the basis of these analyses, it is concluded that there is a significant mismatch between the discourse of interdisciplinarity and associated conceptions of knowledge on the one hand, and current, relatively inflexible governmental research funding and evaluation practices on the other. It is finally proposed that the occurrence and perpetuation of such a mismatch in the Australian context can only be understood properly if placed in the context of a more general paradox of 4 research governance, where a politically charged rhetoric of innovation conflicts with the actual trend toward an increasingly diminishing scope for the selforganisation of knowledge.

A stream of debate (including a previous special issue of this journal (25(1) 2014)) has made claims not just for ‘bringing knowledge back in’ as the framing underpinning of the school curriculum, but that subjects associated with disciplinary and disciplined knowledge forms have a particular power and that these characteristics are important to preserve in curriculum frameworks. This paper draws on a major Australian research project studying school and university physics in the context of these arguments to revisit the issue of the ‘discipline’ of physics and the curriculum logics for physics. Given that disciplines are social in origin and changing and expanding over time, can school curriculum be logically derived from the discipline to which they relate? Are questions about student engagement only questions about pedagogy and not curriculum? Does a focus on disciplinary knowledge mean that the role of school in forming identities and values is avoidable as a significant feature of what the curriculum does? The findings from the project are used both to illustrate and test these questions, and to challenge some over‐simple assumptions about the verticality of this form of knowledge for education purposes.

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