Academic Collaboration as an Experiment

Abstracts

The Shaping of Science Through Collaborative Scientific Instrument Development at the European Spallation Source

By Ekky Tammarar Alfian, Technical University of Denmark, with Liisa Välikangas.

Scientific instruments assume an imperative role in science as it often determines what can be done and thought in a research or experiment. Despite the importance of scientific instruments, knowledge on how the collaborative process in developing a scientific instrument shapes science, remains limited. The shaping of science in this case is defined by the changes in the scientific capability of an instrument. The aim of this study is thus to examine how the collaborative process in developing scientific instruments for the European Spallation Source (ESS), a research facility housing the world´s most powerful neutron source, shapes science. This study is based on observations of activities and in-depth interviews of scientists involved in the development of four different scientific instruments for ESS. The main contribution of this study is to highlight how science is constructed by factors unrelated to science and technology during the process of creating scientific instruments. The shaping of science is salient in three different events: (1) The collaboration forming process where scientific instrument development consortiums were formed based on the amalgamation of collaboration history, perception of benefit, and pecuniary factors; (2) The scientific instrument design process where the instrument design is shaped by the ideals of the initial designer, user community, and fellow consortium partners; (3) The active process of scientists in selecting the types of early experiments aimed at appeasing public expectations due to the exorbitant investment that has been made.

Business education for sustainability: A collective autoethnography

By Mounia Borg, Södertörn University; with Matilda Dahl, Lovísa Eiríksdóttir, Jenny Helin, Abe Hendriks, Lotte Horikx, Elsa Le Ber, Khang Lê, Giorgia Dalla, Libera Marchiori, Lucy Schulze, Timi Sallinen.

How can we render the experimental academic positions safe and productive also for the precarious academic staff?

By Myrto Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou, Linköping University.

Two postdoctoral positions of 2-3 years were announced in 2022 that would act as experimental collaborations between gender studies and data science. Each postdoc would ‘belong’ to by both departments, but one would be based administrative in the first and the second in the latter. This could sound like a true ‘experimental entanglement’, at least administrative wise. Many challenges were encountered since the first months of one of the postdocs. Except for personal issues that can affect a collaboration – communication success, care, personality matching -  there were also systemic challenges in relation to different academic practices between the two departments as well as common institutional and organizational constraints. A matter of high importance were the spatial aspects of this collaboration where the researcher had to split their time between the two departments and the related activities as well as their social and intellectual skills to adapt to both environments – and many more related to each of the departments. Is the current neoliberal academic system fruitful for such experiments? And how can the current reconfigurations of the academic system facilitate also the easing of personal issues that arise?

Monitoring environmental AMR and implications on health: Need for co-producing novel knowledge

By Arunima Mukherjee, UiO.

Imagine a river ecosystem surrounded by antibiotics manufacturing facilities, routinely dumping their effluents (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients - API) in the river, around which people live and depend on the water for drinking, washing and farming needs. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) generated in the environment is a direct health hazard and raises two questions: i) what knowledge required to monitor the implications of environmental AMR on health; ii) how should this knowledge be developed and revised.

Required knowledge required is novel and interdisciplinary, spanning domains of climate science, microbiology,digital technologies and data management, and policy science. Given the novelty and multiplicity of this knowledge, Science and Technology Studies promotes the concept of co-production, relevant respond to such complex and uncertain phenomenon. Jasanoff [i], has argued that we gain explanatory power, particularly in complex novel domains, by thinking of the natural and social orders as jointly produced. Co-production is the shorthand for the proposition that the ways in which we know and represent the world are inseparable from how we choose to live in it. Society cannot function without knowledge, which in turn cannot exist without appropriate social support. Co-production can be seen as being symmetrical in that each alternative to the social dimension, underscoring the material and epistemic correlates of the social functions. Co-production highlights the often- invisible role of knowledge, expertise, technical practices and material objects relevant in transforming relations of authority and how technical practices are socially structured.

Observing and/or intervening? Large-scale collaboration from the perspective of STS

By Helene Sorgner, University of Klagenfurt.

To experiment is to study controlled variation, but introducing variation requires intervention. How, as STS scholars, may or should we intervene in the research collaborations we normally “just” observe? This talk draws on insights from three types of research collaborations: the interdisciplinary research group “The Epistemology of the Large Hadron Collider” (ELHC), the particle physics collaboration that this group and my dissertation study (ATLAS), and the emerging “new generation” of the Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT). This astrophysics collaboration will produce high-quality images of black holes by combining observations from telescopes around the globe. It features a working group on history, philosophy and culture, involving scholars from the humanities and social sciences. The idea is to address ethical (responsible siting of telescopes), epistemological, and governance challenges to avoid past mistakes and create a better collaboration from the start. While the ELHC is a project connecting heterogeneous research interests, and ATLAS a collaboration looking for improvement within established frameworks, ngEHT is intended to be a true experiment: It introduces new variables into known conditions, with the potential of transforming those conditions altogether. As an STS scholar who is a member of ELHC and ngEHT, and an observer of ATLAS, I take this panel as an opportunity to discuss the limitations and opportunities of getting involved in experimental collaborations. In particular, setting up and learning from experiments raises questions of scale and translation: How do we transfer insights from one context to another? And how do we transform critical observations into constructive collaboration?

An experimental and reflexive study of interdisciplinary forest sustainability projects to uncover inequalities in academic collaborations

By Camilla Tetley, Technical University of Munich; with Susanne Koch.

Despite a need for transformative research for sustainability (Turnhout and Lahsen, 2022), there is a significant gap in understanding how underlying power asymmetries in academic collaborations impact sustainability progress. Much co-production STS work focusses on partnerships between the public and academia, rather than intra-academic partnerships. I experiment by addressing this research gap and investigating implicit discourse-based inequalities in academic research collaborations. The success of sustainability science is itself assumed to be strongly reliant on collaborative research (Kates in Richardson et al., 2017), and researchers have put forward the need for research on how our knowledge production systems can successfully address global sustainability challenges (Mauser et al., 2013; Horcea-Milcu et al., 2022; Canglia et al., 2021).

By studying interdisciplinary collaborations for forest sustainability across Africa and Europe, I address calls by researchers to critically engage with our current knowledge production systems (Maas et al., 2020; Lahsen and Turnhout, 2021). I ask how we, as researchers, can study and understand inequalities in interdisciplinary research collaborations. In doing so, I investigate academic practises and research culture.
Furthermore, I experiment with my own positionality. I build on methodological literature with a reflexive paper, about my own role as a researcher. I ask, what is our role as researchers of the production of knowledge? How do, should, can, we engage? What can we learn from these experiences?

Investigating interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity: methods, experiments and tools for  collaborative knowledge production

By Bianca Vienni-Baptista; Transdisciplinarity Lab, ETH Zurich.

At the centre of this paper is an inquiry into how collaborative interdisciplinary research (IDR) and transdisciplinary research (TDR) can more effectively address scientific and societal challenges. Worldwide multidimensional crises urgently call for more collaborative research with the aim of transforming social reality. However, many factors still act as obstacles to high-impact research, resulting in deficiencies and disconnects between practice and policy. As a result, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are trapped in a pervasive contradiction between promotional rhetoric on the one hand and relatively inflexible institutional and funding reward systems on the other. If inter- and transdisciplinarity remain elusive, is it because we are still incapable of applying the right methods or experiments to grasp their heterogeneity and contextual differences? There is an urgent need for an in-depth understanding of what it means to do interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, with their epistemic, cultural, social and political implications for the science–policy interface.
This paper presents findings from a research study focusing on methods and tools used to investigate IDR and TDR in Europe. We conducted an extensive meta-ethnography, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with European researchers and practitioners who have taken IDR and TDR as their object of study or experimentation.
To conclude we elaborate on three interrelated dimensions i) cultures, ii) practices and iii) policies. We explain how the understanding of these dimensions and their intersections is still incomplete, with little potential for comparison and a disconnection between theory and practice. 

Interdisciplinary ‘therapy’: Articulating values and valuing disagreement in a long-term collaboration between a museum and a biomedical research center

By Louise Whiteley, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen

In 2010, the University of Copenhagen began an experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration: the university museum Medical Museion was to host part of a newly established biomedical research center. Conducting qualitative research on a par with the scientific groups, whilst also developing a platform for public engagement, this was a hybrid in several senses. Combining different forms of knowledge production; entangling research and museum practice; and blurring public and academic space. The experiment has continuously evolved, testing new conditions and catalysts whilst also doing the slow work of building trust and reciprocity. In this paper I will share examples from a decade of work within this setting. I will show how making things together – from an exhibition to a conference panel – has allowed the people and practices involved to get to know and appreciate each other in new ways. I will then articulate some propositions for what makes these experiments exciting, and ponder how they might travel to other contexts. These propositions together constitute a call for ‘interdisciplinary therapy’; for articulating ethos and fears as much as goals and skills; for valuing disagreement, and exploring the creative potentials of mistranslation. This requires time, and the paper thus also advocates for valuing (if not always enacting) slowness. For seeing the slow build that lies behind punctate productivity, and for extending this to how we seek the impacts of experimental collaboration as they evolve over time.

Organizers

Tobias Drewlani, Technical University of Berlin and Maria Bårdsen Hesjedal, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)