WORKSHOP May 2009 CFP

Enacting social sciences and humanities within contemporary science policy landscape
CALL FOR PAPERS

Venue: Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Date: May 22–23, 2009
Deadline for applications and abstracts: April 10, 2009
Deadline for papers: May 15, 2009.
http://www.sshstudies.net

Science has always been entangled with politics. Since WWII the political influence on science has been taking a form of an ever stronger policy intervention. While the timing and scope differ for countries the general tendency is clear: science policies strive to measure impact and effectiveness of research, enhance and channel mobility of researchers, stimulate collaborations and knowledge transfer between the academy and industry. Like other neoliberal policies science policy pretends to be apolitical and care solely about “excellence” and “effectiveness”. We would like to disclose and analyse the politics - of knowledge and social order - implicated in the policy interventions by starting from the observation that while the measure and quality criteria employed are most often formulated as universal for science as a whole many of them prioritise the model of knowledge production and career in (certain) natural sciences and technical disciplines. We want to take up the double marginality of social sciences and humanities (SSH) – with regard to the modern objectivist pretension to exact and causal knowledge on one hand and the neoliberal pretension to instrumental and marketable knowledge on the other – as a standpoint from which we could analyse the dominant science imaginaries and practices.

The goal of the workshop is to map the diversity – or uniformity – of policy treatments of SSH in different countries; to investigate some of the implications these polices have for knowledge production and research careers in SSH; and to think about implications current polices have for so called “knowledge society” we are living in. We want to focus specifically on two dimensions of science policies. First, we want to analyse the concept of “impact”, both academic and societal, implied in science policies and the possibilities of assessing it. To give an example, in the Czech Republic only technological outputs count as a legitimate form of societal (non-academic) impact of science which has implications for SSH as its articulations in society take different forms. Second, we want to look into research priorities – how they are constructed and legitimated, and to what sort of society SSH are encouraged to contribute. We invite papers based on empirical study including auto-ethnography.

We would like to arrange a meeting of collective in situ thinking. In order to keep the space for discussions during the workshop, we ask participants to send in advance a paper (5-10 pages) including a brief sketch of science policies in their countries concerning SSH with a focus on “impact” and “research priorities” and a short “case study” discussing one issue in greater detail. Participants from the same country can coordinate a partially shared paper or one of them can look at EU policy. Abstracts containing contact address should be sent to policies@sshstudies.net to the organisers of the workshop Alice Červinková and Tereza Stöckelová (Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic), Katja Mayer and Veronika Wöhrer (University of Vienna, Austria) who are associated in http://www.sshstudies.net .

We would like to prepare a special issue with contributions of participants including collective conclusions (may we arrive at them).

Venue: Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Date: May 22–23, 2009
Deadline for applications and abstracts: April 10, 2009
Deadline for papers: May 15, 2009.