Universities and Grand Societal Challenges: Disrupting academic work and modern knowledge-making ecologies

Abstracts

Mapping STS knowledge in practice – methods and practices for the future? 

Helen Jøsok Gansmo, NTNU

Education may be regarded as a inherently long-term future-oriented future-making practices. Particularly in times of disruption and crisis (climate crises, population development, rapid changes in industry etc), the production of the skills needed in the future labor market is under stress, now particularly related to debates on the autonomy and accountability of higher education institutions as well as the usefulness of university degrees and work life relevance of education. 

Examining application of university education may be regarded as one opportunity to study what acting on the future means and entails. STS has a long tradition for studying how other sciences produce knowledge, and how this knowledge travels out into the world. STS as an interdisciplinary and often anti-disciplinary field have relatively few conversations about professional training in STS, and within STS there has been less research on the universities/teaching itself, and not least on how STS knowledge travels out into the world and is made effective in networks with other practices and fields of knowledge. This presentation will “turn the microscope back to the STS lab”. 

Based on qualitative interviews with STS graduates from NTNU this presentation will link lessons from the past with university utopias and hopeful futures; exploring and rethinking STS scholarship and its role in society through discussing the usefulness of university degrees and how these graduates working in non-academic settings seek ways to apply and futureproof their STS methods and practices as tools for building productive (interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary) relations and knowledge outside of academia/research.

Integrity and Open Science for Public Trust in Science? Not self-evident!

Serge P.J.M. Horbach, Danish Center for Studies in Research and Research Policy - Aarhus University

In a context where societal dependence on sound scientific research and responsible innovation has become increasingly visible, concerns about public trust and mistrust in science have simultaneously been mounting. The debate about societal trust in science is characterised by two intuitively appealing assumptions: First, that trust depends on scientists’ capacity to demonstrate high standards of research integrity and ethics, and that breaches to research integrity will lead to mistrust. Second, that citizen and civil society’s involvement in co-creating research agendas and contents makes research more relevant and responsive to society, consequently strengthening trust. 

Both assumptions are continuously used as motivation for addressing research integrity issues and for rolling out the open science agenda. However, while these assumptions seem plausible, they are understudied and in fact, some initial research has provided evidence for the contrary. Based on work in the Horizon Europe POIESIS project, this talk discusses the effect of research integrity and open science practices on public trust in science. The talk builds particularly on an assessment of international public surveys on public perceptions of science and a critical review of the existing literature. It concludes that such trust is highly contextual, suggesting that the two assumptions introduced above do not hold as straightforwardly as often assumed. We subsequently identify several contextual elements mediating public perceptions of science related to integrity and societal integration in research, as well as potentially confounding factors requiring further research.

Informal Academic Sharing

Zakayo Kjellström, Umea University

This presentation explores the informal academic sharing that takes place on two subreddits: r/scholar and r/libgen. While both subreddits focus on the dissemination of academic papers and books, they differ in their goals. R/libgen is dedicated to discussions regarding the shadow library "Library Genesis", while r/scholar is focused on satisfying user requests. Through an analysis of 80,000 comments, the presentation aims to understand how people interact academically outside the formal structures of academia.

The data collection process involved the python libraries natural language toolkit (NLTK), gensim, and VADERsentiment to analyze the dataset. The analysis revealed several topics, including searching for books on different sites, accessing books through databases and libraries, safety concerns and legal issues related to finding audiobooks, and using subreddits and wikis to find answers to common questions and concerns.

During the presentation I will discuss the minimal interaction between the two subreddits, and indications of an infrastructural inversion and potential leakages from the formal academic sector into the informality of the Reddit platform. The weaknesses and biases of the formal system are revealed through this informal sharing, while prefigurativism and a utopian ideal of academic dissemination are glimpsed. The subreddits themselves are also rooted in the system they work against, displaying an interesting dependent antagonism worth exploring.

Interdisciplinary Research, Tenure Review, and Guardians of the Disciplinary Order

Elina Mäkinen, Tampere University; with Eliza D. Evans and Daniel A. McFarland

Interdisciplinary research—the creation of knowledge across disciplines, theories, and methods—is seen as a source of novelty and a useful way to advance science and research on grand societal challenges. While interdisciplinarity has been promoted in universities for decades, early-career researchers struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary research. Research has shown that interdisciplinary scholars find it difficult to build scholarly identities and fit in the discipline-based organization of academia. Yet we know little about how interdisciplinarity affects advancement in academic careers. Informed by institutional work and discursive legitimation, we examine how tenure and promotion norms are understood and constructed in relation to disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in a prestigious private university. Our analysis draws on 59 interviews with department chairs, directors of interdisciplinary centers, and disciplinary and interdisciplinary untenured scholars. We identify two forms of discursive legitimation—expansion and expulsion—which demonstrate scholars’ efforts to transform or maintain current tenure and promotion norms. We found that senior scholars engaged in institutional maintenance in the context of interdisciplinary research and tenure review. They acted as the guardians of the disciplinary order reproducing tenure and promotion norms through discursive legitimation, institutional practices, and positions of power. While untenured interdisciplinary scholars had developed strategies for legitimizing their research, they were taking personal career risks to accomplish the interdisciplinary aims of their universities.

Beyond the default – Gender in EU research and innovation proposals

Katrin Mögele, Technical University Munich; with Clemens Striebing

Our research explores how the integration of gender performs in application practices for EU funding programmes. Reduced basic funding, increased competition for grants, and heightened public scrutiny has led to “grant writing (having) become a central activity in academic life” (Serrano Velarde 2018, 86). This activity is understudied in STS, mainly due to a lack of access to proposals (cf. Laudel 2006). Via our scientific network, we randomly collected around 80 proposals for H2020/HorizonEurope funded climate projects, which we analyse with a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2006).

Grant writing for EU projects, calls applicants to transcend disciplinary silos and outdated processes of knowledge production (see Carayannis et al. 2012) to create excellent science and impactful solutions for societal challenges (cf. Gläser et al. 2002). Since the EU requires applicants to integrate gender, not necessarily implicit to the research process (Criado Perez 2020), and due to the integral gender dimension of the climate crisis (Spitzner et al. 2020), we focus on how gender performs in grant writing for climate projects.

Our preliminary analysis shows the applicants’ awareness of the requirement per se. However, they show a highly fragmented discourse practice (i.a., lack of methodological knowledge, focus on gender equality, unclear terminology). This confirms the institutionalisation of grant writing practices in academia (cf. Serrano Velarde 2018) but misses the institutionalisation of gender as integral part of the knowledge production process. 

The conclusion prompts further research into how funders and fundees define, respectively conceive the integration of gender in research and innovation.

Multispecies entanglements and universities of the future: Reimagining Bacon’s New Atlantis

Kyriaki Papageorgiou, NTNU

Using Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as a reference point and source inspiration, this paper explores “alternative knowledge making ecologies” (Sørensen & Traweek 2022:35) that address some of the current challenges facing universities and the kind of knowledge they generate. Bacon's utopian narrative captured the zeitgeist of his time and presented a vision of science and society that crystallized the Man-Nature split that became embedded in modern academic institutions. This paper engages the work of scholars that link climate change concerns to the life of plants, animals, and other organisms to critically reassess the man vs. nature paradigm that permeates modern knowledge building. How might multispecies studies help us rethink the links between academia and society and reimagine "Solomon's House" or "College of the Six Days' Work"? Most modernist imaginaries on which political intervention and social change were built on metanarratives of progress and development. Currently, questions about the future that are characterized by a sense of crisis, uncertainty and precariousness, and inadequate political alternatives. This paper builds on the research in anthropology and STS about imaginaries, performativity, and hope to co-create alternatives and new narratives about universities that carefully consider intersectional inequalities and multispecies entanglements.

Intersections of international professional mobility and tourism among
Swedish physicians and researchers: A cultural analysis

Helena Pettersson, Umeå University; with Katarzyna Wolanik Boström

How do highly skilled Swedish professionals who work for some time in another country become temporary tourists, in-between mandatory job obligations, or indeed even while performing their work tasks, and how does it relate to their experience of professional “good life” (Öhlander, Wolanik Boström & Pettersson 2022)? The aim of this paper is to highlight these intertwined and multidimensional practices by analyzing highly skilled professionals’ reflections on their international work-related stays and travels. The professionals at the core of our research are physicians, molecular biologists, and scholars within the humanities. 

Expanding universities between convergence and divergence: How living labs provide a space for the practice of a paradox in knowledge production

Anamaria-Ioana Rasenescu, Living Labs Incubator, Human Technology Center, RWTH Aachen University

Adequate policy responses to grand societal challenges require drastic transformations of technology and society alike (Engels et al. 2019). The increasing importance of knowledge and innovation puts transfer activities at universities and research institutions in the spotlight of science policy, the economy and society at large (Cuesta-Claros et al. 2021). Universities are challenged to orient teaching and research to processes of social change. Thus, the integration of science and society represents a central task for knowledge and technology transfer at and through universities. The central core task of research thus becomes the co-analysis, understanding and design of complex systems.

However, not only do universities aspire to a convergent mode of inter- and transdisiplinary research and knowledge production, they also aim at the inclusion of a plurality of thought, experience and societal needs. To tackle these requirements, Living Labs (LLs) have come to be the research facility of the future for technical universities to address societal challenges, involving complex technologies and social innovations.

As co-creative innovation and research formats, LLs involve a multitude of heterogeneous stakeholders who generate and co-develop an arena for the negotiation and design of future imaginaries, making LLs arenas of organized diversity.

Currently, there is a lack of insights into how living labs deal with both the demand for both convergence and divergence in research and innovation. In order to fill this gap, this contribution takes a look at the potentials and challenges in strategic collaboration through co-creation in living labs.

Integrating research in teaching in a time of performance governance: Dilemmas of assessment of research-based teaching through the lens of Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology

Marie Ryberg, Department of Science Education / University of Copenhagen

The combination of research and teaching is often described as the principle distinguishing the university from other institutions that either do research or offer education. Recent calls for research-based teaching point to this principle as based in the ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s visions of higher education as treating science as a problem that has still not been fully resolved. While combining research and teaching was never straightforward in practice, a particular problem emerges around this principle in today’s mass university, which is increasingly organized around governing performance through explicit – and thus definite – measures. 

This paper discusses the dilemmas of assessment in courses aiming to integrate research in teaching in a Danish university. Drawing on ethnographic studies of courses in a university-wide initiative to promote the integration of research and teaching, the paper considers why both teachers and students relate to exams as somehow at odds with a research process. The paper introduces French sociologist Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology to conceptualize this in terms of the differing ways an individual engages and invest in different situations, or what Thévenot calls the plural regimes of engagement. The paper argues that re-thinking research-based teaching in universities of today calls for a consideration of the dissimilar regimes of engagement – and the different benefits and sacrifices they involve for individuals in practice.

Speech trouble. The policing of academic talk

Knut H. Sørensen, NTNU

Academic freedom and freedom of speech are getting increased attention in many countries where politicians try to intervene in specific academic discourses, such as gender studies, immigration studies, etc. There are also concerns about limitations to freedom of speech that are imposed from within universities. However, the policing of academic talk is not primarily based on political beliefs although such beliefs may have painful consequences. A more pervasive feature is the conduct of epistemic politics, the struggles over who holds relevant expertise, what constitutes relevant expertise, and the assessment of quality of academic statements. This constitutes the collegial regulation of academic speech, which is an ingrained practice in the everyday life of university academics. Epistemic politics tends to be an opaque, black-boxed practice often disguised as ‘professional debate’. This paper explores some consequences of the ghost-like qualities of epistemic politics to the ongoing debates about academic freedom of speech, to show that these debates tend to misunderstand the contradictory features of scientific and scholarly discursive practices. It is based on a study of ongoing debates in Norway, which motivated the government to appoint a commission to review issues labelled academic freedom of speech; the report was published late March 2022. The paper analyses in particular the report from the commission and the ensuing comments to the report from politicians, news media, and university academics. This is meant as a contribution also to STS and science communication studies that have tended to neglect the role of epistemic politics and academic freedom.