RMZ Science Works

Informationen zum Master-Studiengang Wissenschaftsforschung der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:

https://hu.berlin/ma_wifo

Science and politics are becoming increasingly intertwined. Our project starts from two related expressions of this development: increasing political expectations on science and the proliferation of sites that hybridize science and politics. Against this background, we seek to understand (i) how the potentially conflicting demands that scientists face as they engage with political actors feed back into epistemic practice, (ii) how epistemic practices of scientists interact with other epistemic practices and modes of representation at hybrid sites and (iii) how democratic organizational governance interact with epistemic practices. To explore these questions, we have selected 4-6 hybrid sites, including think tanks, political research institutes, NGOs, and social movements for an empirical multi-method analysis combining participant observation with qualitative interviews and document analysis. The project aims to develop a concept of epistemic-political orientations (EPOs) and generate innovative theoretical analysis of the influence of political actors on epistemic practices. Through empirical work, it explores convergences and divergences of democratic and epistemic practices in hybrid organizations in order to gain leverage on broader theoretical questions on the interaction between democracy and the sciences.

Informationen zum Master-Studiengang Wissenschaftsforschung der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:

https://hu.berlin/ma_wifo

The use of digital media in science is not only linked to profound reconfigurations of professional research and the publication system. It also involves changes in the relations of science with broader publics. Public engagement is proliferating online and approaches like Citizen Science promise to extend public participation in research. However, such activities remain riddled with problems. Deficit-model assumptions about publics are persisting and also science skepticism is amplified on social media. The talk presents a refined analytical framework of the multiple publics of science for studying such phenomena and their predecessors. Drawing on the sociological notion of 'inclusion in society', it re-examines popular science audiences and amateur researchers as contributing to the production and evaluation of scientific knowledge claims. On this basis, the talk asks how relations between professional scientists and their non-professional counterparts are transformed under current conditions of digital mediatization.

This talk discusses the possibilities of researchers to continue their work in situations where access to previously held resources is constrained. We start from the assumption that academic researchers rely on specific resources to be able to work. While many of these resources are usually provided by research organizations like universities, scientific communities remain the primary reference point for the work of researchers. The result is that some resources need to be acquired from elsewhere and that research can in some cases be continued without organizational support. The resulting situation is undertheorized by both organization and work studies (because they treat the full provision of resources for employees as a given and the content of work as unproblematic) and science studies (because of their focus on funding as the primary type of resource). We propose to fill this gap by treating the provision of resources as a variable on the one hand and by establishing a link between conditions of research, planned and conducted research processes, and necessary adaptions of researchers to changes in their conditions on the other hand.

We present results from interviews in projects investigating two situations where previously secured access to resources becomes constrained: the unemployment of researchers and the COVID-19 pandemic. The two situations can be compared through conceptualizing their effect on researchers as a change of access in resources. We focus on a comparison of two fields, plant biology and ethnology, to show how different career stages, the timing of research processes, and field-specificity impact the possibilities of researchers to continue working during these situations.

The study examines whether and to what extent academic culture is gendered. The gendered implications of academic culture are analysed through academics' perceptions of workplace culture, their experiences of discrimination and abuse of power, and their reported stress levels. Gender biases are evident across all dimensions examined, leading us to argue that academia operates as a gendered system in which unfavourable working cultures emerge that disproportionately—and more negatively ("chilly")—affect women compared to men. We further demonstrate that gender bias is particularly pronounced at the professorial level, exceeding that observed at earlier career stages. With regard to career conditions, we show that stress levels are especially high among postdoctoral researchers who aspire to a professorship—and higher still among women compared to their male counterparts. We interpret these findings to suggest that the gendered implications of academic culture are closely linked to the ways in which competition in academia is structured, institutionalised, and subjectively experienced.

Scientific associations are often seen as neutral professional bodies, yet they are crucial institutional spaces where norms, credibility, and the boundaries of "expertise" are created and upheld. This talk explores how such organizations navigate between internal academic standards and external pressures and expectations—particularly in non- liberal contexts. Building on a revised interpretation of Burawoy's framework, we suggest a model that identifies four orientations within scientific societies: professional/disciplinary autonomy, reflexive critique, policy engagement, and public engagement. We examine how these orientations become connected or separated under structural and institutional constraints. The talk argues that common dichotomies— instrumental versus reflexive, and academic versus extra-academic—may function differently when professional activity is influenced by political risk, organizational dependence, and unequal access to resources. Although the presentation is based on an ongoing empirical study currently under peer review, it emphasizes the conceptual contribution: theorizing "professionalism under constraint" and demonstrating why scientific associations are significant for comparative STS and the sociology of professions.

Policy research institutes (think-tanks) have become prominent actors. They are widely praised for their capacity to conduct relevant research, to innovate, and for reaching out to practitioners. The British Overseas Development Institute underlines the need for 'evidence based' politics, for example, which updates older versions of science-based policy making and technocratic governance. The growing demand for evidence-based policies nurtures the growth of think-tank populations and paradoxically contributes to the diversification and politicization of think-tank purposes. Critiques have pointed out that many think-tanks do not contribute much in terms of original research, because they are mostly involved in editing and formatting tasks arranged by government institutions. The elitist character of many think-tanks contradicts claims to independence and pluralism. Finally, the use of think-tanks by tobacco and oil companies indicates the scientific production of ignorance, now subject of agnotology studies. Regarding science, the character of think tanks is ambivalent.

Model transfer—the use of models developed in one domain to address problems in another—is widespread in science. Yet it remains underexplored, both empirically and philosophically. In the first part of this talk, I outline some initial ideas about how we might systematically and empirically study model transfer. In the second part, I go more into detail and ask whether, and in what ways, model transfer can shape the impact trajectory of “sleeping beauty” papers—papers that “go unnoticed (‘sleep’) for a long time and then, almost suddenly, attract significant attention (‘are awakened by a prince’)” (van Raan 2004). I present preliminary results from a co-citation analysis conducted using computational methods and network-analytic tools. The analysis has two aims: (1) to identify sleeping beauty papers and (2) to examine how model transfer may contribute to their eventual surge in impact. I illustrate the approach with a case study of model transfer between economics and psychology, focusing on the uptake of economic models of temporal discounting.

Biobanken werden mehr und mehr zu einer allgegenwärtigen Infrastruktur in der Zoologie und anderen Biowissenschaften. Sie versprechen, materielle Forschungsdaten auf unbestimmte Zeit für künftige, noch offene, aber dennoch zu erwartende Zwecke aufzubewahren. Am Beispiel der Einrichtung einer physischen und digitalen Infrastruktur für gefrorene Proben tierischen Materials geht dieser Vortrag der Frage nach, wie die Zukunft die Vergangenheit vorwegnimmt und wie gefrorene Objekte entsprechend gestaltet werden. Indem ich die Biobank zwischen den alltäglichen Routinen der Konservierung in einem Forschungslabor und den "trockenen" und "nassen" Sammlungen von Naturkundemuseen verorte, argumentiere ich, dass eingefrorene Forschungsobjekte auf zwei verschiedene Arten konserviert werden müssen: Die Nichtverfügbarkeit von Kryo-Objekten in Kühllagern zwingt Forscher*innen dazu, physische Proben („Inhalte“) unabhängig von Metadaten („Kontext“) zu behandeln. Gleichzeitig aber müssen sie eine Verbindung zwischen ihnen aufrechterhalten, die ihre Wiedervereinigung nach dem Auftauen ermöglicht. Das Ergebnis ist ein gespaltenes Objekt, das ein Doppelleben zwischen Minusgraden und Raumtemperatur führt und nur durch die Oberfläche spezieller Kunststoffbehälter verbunden ist. Indem er der Herstellung von Kryo-Objekten nachgeht, versucht sich dieser Vortrag an einer Reflexion über Joanna Radins "geplanten Rückblick" als Praxis.

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration that gathered over two hundred international scientists famously revealed the first empirical images of a black hole—a mysterious cosmic object thus far regarded ‘unseeable’. To create these revolutionary images that visualise the immediate surrounding of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87, the EHT team used a constellation of seven radio telescopes that spanned the Earth and then spent two years algorithmically reconstructing empirically reliable images from the thus collected non-visual data. To obtain valid imaging results, the EHT team deployed multiple methodologies during the image reconstruction process, which all delivered sufficiently consistent results. Apart from revealing their final images to the public, the team also made their processed data and algorithms accessible to the public.

In 2022, five studies authored by scientists who were not members of the EHT team were published. Each study focused on reanalysing the publicly available EHT data, testing if they would obtain sufficiently similar images of the black hole. The stated purpose of these epistemic critiques was to verify the epistemic truth claims of the EHT’s final images of the black hole. The authors of each study thereby deployed different approaches. Some replicated the procedure developed by the EHT team; others developed alternative algorithmic techniques for reconstructing images from the EHT non-visual data. Four of the five critical reanalyses converged on their findings by obtaining images that were sufficiently similar to the initial EHT images published in 2019. One study diverged in their results and was subsequently criticised by the EHT team for its methodology.

As my paper will show, this circulation of the epistemic critique in the community of astrophysicists focused on imaging black holes is far more than a contrived academic exercise. Instead, it is of critical importance for the epistemological consolidation of the currently emerging research field of black hole imaging and, with its fine-grained methodological insights, has the potential to inform future EHT analyses and results. However, while the importance of critical replication studies for the community of specialists is difficult to overestimate, this type of discipline-specific epistemic critique remains highly hermetic. Since the implications and import of such a critique remain opaque for non-specialists, its circulation remains constrained to the members of the scientific community.

Two competing imaginaries inform the current wave of innovations in research publishing: one that perceives ‘the literature’ as a library of research accounts, and one that sees it as a gigantic database. While the library portrays acquiring knowledge as an act of reading texts informed by an understanding of their inter-textual setting, the database sees the literature as a collection of verified facts that can be extracted, or ‘mined’. Both imaginaries present different understandings of what the research literature is, of which knowledge is valued in that literature, how it should be curated and what it should be usable for. Using basic notions of socio-technical infrastructures and inspired by the work of Ricœur, we analyse how these imaginaries are at work in current publishing innovations, such as new tools for enriching text with tags for uniquely identified research entities, new publication platforms and formats such as micro-publications or mega-journals, or forms of meta-analysis. We highlight how both imaginaries can derail into phantasmagories and explore how reflecting on their premises can inform productive accommodations of both.