By Florentine Frantz

When you study medicine, you become a doctor. When you study law, you become a lawyer. But when you study STS, what do you become? The answer to that question is not straight forward, but it is a pressing one, for current and future STS students. Therefore, my colleagues from the STS Austria Council, Max Fochler and Helene Sorgner, Martina Merz, and I decided to organize a workshop titled “Skills, Career Trajectories and Stories”*. Many students from both Austrian STS Master programs (University of Vienna and University of Klagenfurt) as well as a handful of PhD students attended our event in early December. In this blog-post, I want to share my reflections on the event.

Skills – “You might not be aware of what you know”

You might not be aware of what you know – was one of the major takeaways from Jessica Mesman’s keynote speech. She repeatedly highlighted that STS people are often not aware of their own skills. Still, knowing what you know may be critical when thinking about careers. Many of the skills we acquire throughout our studies are seemingly invisible and become tacit intellectual tools. However, they are valuable assets in many different working environments.

STS people think differently about reality. STS students, who might be attracted by the shining buzzwords of Science, Technology or Innovation, will soon learn that STS people have distinct and critical perspectives on them: Science is understood not as a value-free search for truth, but as a complex socio-technical assemblage, full of practices, cultures and meanings. Moreover, science is never decoupled from society, but it is always embedded within specific contexts and co-produced with them. Technologies are in STS not understood as passive artefacts, but as active and political non-human actors. Innovation is never just technological innovation but always social innovation too, in how it is collectively imagined and in how it changes society. We often think about the same concepts as other people, but we think differently about them. We approach them with an intellectual sensibility that aims to recognize tacit assumptions, values or political and social dimensions.

This particular perspective on reality also is mirrored in how STS people approach problems. On the one hand, they are problem analysts, who don’t start with quick fixes. They open problems up trying to understand the underlying complexities and entanglements between actors before they propose solutions. On the other hand, STS people engage in counter-intuitive reasoning, in how they open black boxes and think outside boxes. Jessica, for instance, works with the notion of exnovation instead of innovation. Thus, she thinks about what we can learn from what is already there to improve, rather than fostering innovation, where new things are deemed necessary to improve a situation.

In our increasingly complex technoscientific worlds, it is often not enough to look at challenges only from one angle. That’s why STS education covers a wide range of disciplinary inputs, including sociology, philosophy, feminist studies, political science, anthropology, or the history and philosophy of science, which should give us the intellectual tools to grasp what’s going on in the situations we study.

But also, in who does STS, we see wide-ranging interdisciplinarity. While bringing the multidisciplinary perspectives together may be challenging in the first month of an STS Master’s program, it is definitely worth it. The capacity to look at things from different angles makes STS graduates not only good bridge builders in future jobs but also creates an attentiveness for how to deal with the intertwinedness and the complexity of the world, and to embrace a diversity of perspectives as desirable.

Moreover, we are often not aware of the advanced social and general skills we learn. We learn how to ask questions and strategies for answering them. We learn how to present and communicate our results and gain argumentative resources. We learn time and project management. Just because there is no “Soft-Skills” label attached to it, it does not mean that there are no soft-skills being trained.

 

Career Trajectories & Stories

Besides awareness of skills, it helps to have some ideas in mind of where people go and what people do when they do STS and get paid for it. Here, we can, of course, refer to wider job categories such as reflexive technology assessment, consulting, STI policy, science education, research funding agencies or journalism. Nonetheless, we thought it would be fascinating to have real people telling us about their STS career trajectories. Thus, we invited 6 STS alumni as “Living Books” to our workshop, who can tell us their stories of what and how they worked after having pursued an STS education.

None of our guests had foreseen their career-trajectories after having completed their studies. We heard about fortunate coincidences, of a back and forth between jobs or about prolonging jobs because too many new projects came up. Still, they all described how the skills they learned in STS are important in their everyday work. In particular, being sensitive to build-in assumptions and the capacity to get the bigger picture. Moreover, some of them reported how they developed their STS perspectives further throughout their occupational life. You probably haven’t mastered STS 100% once you get your Master’s degree. You learn rather how to look at the world, and the more you see, the more you can understand and question it

You will hardly find any STS jobs which are explicitly looking for graduates wearing the “Science, Technology, Society” label. But, looking into the required qualification of many jobs, you will most likely see that you are well trained for a variety of jobs carrying other labels. Still, it can sometimes, be challenging to illustrate your skills to your future employer and show what you are capable of doing or how you are capable of thinking. In particular, because googling “STS” in Austria might yield results about a famous Austropop band with the same name. However, it can be helpful to illustrate what STS does by providing your own empirical work in the form of theses, articles, blog-posts or seminar papers.

Also, not every STS course of studies, even within the same Master’s programme, is the same. At the University of Vienna, students are free to choose between different research specializations and thematic courses within them. It allows students to develop their individual interests regarding the manifold relationships between science, technology, and society further. This influences, of course, which topics we think more or less about. But, as Jessica reminded us STS people are trained as specialized generalists. We get specialized in how to look at the world, but we are not limited by where to look at. Hence, rest reassured, just because you write your thesis on one topic doesn’t mean you can never do anything else again.

Concluding, I want to stress, drawing on Jessica’s talk, that just because “We are always critical in STS. We are never just applauding”, we should not be overly critical when it comes to our own skillset. Even though there is no stereotypical career path as it is the case with many other lines of education, this does by no means mean that there are no jobs for STS graduates. We get trained a wide range of valuable skills, which we can apply in a myriad of ways, be it in working environments or in life more generally.

* At this point, I want to thank my co-organizers for being a dream-team organizing committee.

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Florentine Frantz is a PhD student and researcher at the Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice, working in the project Borderlands of Good Scientific Practice. Her main research interests lie in studying the dynamics of contemporary academia as well as how and which socio-epistemic and institutional configurations matter for doing research, in particular doing ‘good’ research.

By Ruth Falkenberg

As STS researchers, we constantly examine how knowledge is produced as well as disseminated, we inquire into the ways in which stories about science and technology are told and shared. In telling our own stories, we usually stick to established and commonly accepted forms of academic communication – we give conference presentations, we write papers for peer-reviewed journals, and already writing a blogpost like this one seems to be a refreshingly different form of engagement. Yet why not tell our own stories in more radically different ways?

The importance of rethinking the ways in which we tell our stories has been highlighted by STS scholars such as John Law, who in his book After Method encourages us to open up academic research and writing more to creativity and departures from the normativity of standard methods, in order to allow for grasping and enacting a wider range of realities. Being more directly concerned with practices of storytelling, also Donna Haraway frequently invites us to think about ways of ‘storying otherwise’.

One form of story-telling that enjoys quite some popularity – and that is increasingly used for the dissemination of information about science and technology – is the podcast. For me, the podcast is an interesting medium that allows to tell, approach, and receive stories in different ways. Thinking about calls like the one by Law to open up our own ways of storytelling, I started to look out for approaches in the field of STS that use this medium. In this blogpost, I want to present a selection of the variety of interesting podcasts that I came across during my search, amongst which some are recommendations from my colleagues here at the Vienna STS department. Not all of these podcasts have been produced by STS scholars, but they all touch upon issues related to our field of inquiry, open up new perspectives, and tell stories in ways that are a bit unlike than what we are used to.

An interesting example of an STSy podcast is the “How To Think About Science” series in which David Cayley talks to and about various philosophers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists of science, among them many familiar voices from the STS community, including, for example, Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Bruno Latour, or Brian Wynne. As an STS scholar, one will not find all too radically new ideas here, yet the series is definitely a valuable opportunity to listen to some STS stories in a different format than usual. Moreover, while the podcast series is framed as a look at science as an institution rather than STS per se, it still seems worth a recommendation for people outside of our own field who want to engage with some introductory STS perspectives without having to read lengthy academic papers.

Another thought-provoking introductory piece to some STS ideas is a podcast on “The Invention of Objectivity” with Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston, hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Coming rather from a history of science perspective, it may equally be worth a recommendation to students at the beginning of their careers in STS and as well to people who want to engage with science and its often taken for granted assumptions in a critical and reflexive manner.

A podcast that engages with more concrete issues surrounding technoscience and its relation to the societies we live in, is produced by the Bergman Klein Centre for Internet and Society who publish fishbowl discussions or other events in a podcast format. Here, one can follow conversations of “leading cyber-scholars, entrepreneurs, activists, and policymakers as they explore the bleeding edge of the internet and technology, democracy, law, and society”: The discussed topics range from algorithmic bias in resume search engines employed in hiring processes to broad issues such as how technology can be governed.

In contrast to this rather unconventional podcast format, the Digital Sociology Podcast by sociologist Christopher Till utilizes a more classical interview style, featuring conversations with various scholars who deal with digital culture and society in different ways. It is also worth scrolling further down the archive of this series, which started out with podcasts focusing specifically on Digital Health/Digital Capitalism. Personally, I would particularly recommend episode three featuring philosopher of technology Tamar Sharon who talks about her work on self-tracking and the quantified self.

Addressing a much broader and less academic audience, the podcasts of the Freakonomics series deal with “the hidden sides of everything” (thus not only but still often focusing on science and technology). While the series is not made by STS scholars or focusing primarily on STS topics, the hosts often take things apart in a quite critical manner, and definitely offer though-provoking viewpoints. Dealing with topics that range from 23andMe (a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company) to “How the Supermarket Helped America Win the Cold War”, the podcasts offer interesting opportunities to encounter (critical) perspectives on science and technology provided by people from other fields than our own.

Similarly, also the 99% invisible podcast is not explicitly devoted to STS topics, but in dealing with the unnoticed aspects of (technological) design and architecture in the worlds that surround us, it often offers quite STSy viewpoints. The podcast’s episodes usually focus on a specific example of design and often feature interviews with architects, various kinds of experts, or people who have been influenced by the design – thus including both designer as well as user perspectives.

The last two podcasts I want to mention here may come closest to the idea of specifically sharing STS perspectives with a wider audience. One of these has recently been launched by STS scholars Shobita Partasarathy and Jack Stilgoe. In their podcast, they aim to challenge what they call “The Received Wisdom” about science, technology, and politics by talking to “thinkers and doers” from various domains and places. In doing so, they indent to reach audiences beyond our own academic field, to engage with people “out in the world” and specifically with those actually involved with science and technology. Setting out with these – from my perspective – quite promising goals, the first episode of the podcast already addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time – climate and tech activism in the context of the global climate crisis.

Last, a captivating podcast series produced by the Munich Centre for Technology in Society in the context of a seminar hosted by Ruth Müller. Quite in line with the thoughts that motivated me to write this blogpost, relating to how we can broaden our own ways of sharing and disseminating our stories, the seminar’s aim was to engage with the genre of the podcast in order to develop new practices of storytelling, specifically aiming to put questions of responsibility, sustainability and socio-ecological justice centre stage. The different episodes then deal with questions ranging from “What does it mean to drink a coffee “to go”?” to “How do scientists deal with questions they might never find an answer to?”.

Overall, while the collection of podcasts that I have presented here is certainly very selective, it may provide an impression of the various interesting formats that already exist out there in which one can listen to STS-related stories. I hope that this overview may serve as a stimulus for some who read this – for the own consumption or for recommendations to others, but especially also as an encouragement to maybe try out ourselves such different forms of sharing the knowledge we produce with wider audiences.

I want to thank all my colleagues from the Vienna STS department who provided me with very interesting and valuable inputs on my search for STSy podcasts.

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Ruth Falkenberg is a PhD student at the Research Platform Responsbile Research and Innovation in Academic Practice. She is interested in cultures of knowledge production and valuation practices in academia, particularly in the context of contemporary neoliberal regimes of research governance. Her dissertation is part of the project Valuing, Being and Knowing in Research Practices, which investigates how valuation practices and processes of subjectification are entangled with strategic decisions in researchers’ work.

By Artemis Papadaki Anastasopoulou

Anna Tsing writes how indeterminate encounters shape who we are. We are all contaminated, as “purity is not an option”¹ and multiple indeterminate encounters give us form and life. They are indeterminate because there is no direct control of their outcome; it is life in precarity at its finest. However, despite this absence of control, we can and, as I argue, should position ourselves in time-spaces where such encounters can happen – e.g. conferences, as I discuss in the following, along my experience of attending the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) Conference in Lancaster in summer 2018.

Exactly there, I not only had the chance to present some of my own work, but also got to experience multiple indeterminate encounters with people, topics, paper programmes, spaces and ideas. In the two following brief episodes, I touch not only on the meetings with people I would never had the chance to interact with otherwise, but also on the process of finding one’s own personal interests in the STS archipelago. Therefore, these are written accounts of encounters that deeply shaped my understanding of STS as discipline and of my own way of being in and out of the STS community.

Above all, I want to encourage Master’s students to go to such conferences, to position themselves in spaces in which such encounters can happen. In Lancaster, I could not fail to notice the low number of Master’s students within the conference crowd. “Why are there so few Master’s students attending this conference?” – that was a question which I kept coming back to whilst and after being there. Exploring and discussing this phenomenon with a colleague at post-doc level, he mentioned that he too did not attend conferences when being a Master’s student, simply because of not perceiving himself as part of the community. Giving a systematic answer to why Master’s students don’t attend conferences is beyond the given scope, but drawing on my own experience I briefly want to explore some reasons why I believe Master’s students should attend the EASST conference, and also touch upon the practical issues that might restrict them from doing so.

Beyond heroines and heroes

It’s 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 25th of July, and I am in front of Lancaster University’s Catholic Chapel, where a group of people are gathering for the ‘Meeting Soil’ excursion. The registration desk is not open yet, so no one is wearing name tags. As we head to the Ecohub garden and the permaculture grounds we are asked to communicate in small groups about who we are, why we are here, but also how we feel about being there. I was excited! What a great conference opener, encountering new people in a garden just to talk—first names only, not much academic talk, just talk.

Later in the afternoon, I am sitting in a panel discussion. In front of me are my own STS heroines and heroes, many of whom who I know only by reading their name tags. I was enthused. Having had read their work in my first semester, I felt like knowing them a little. The feeling was great, but I didn’t get to speak to them. On the other hand, I spoke to many other people whose work I had never read. I spoke with a person who is teaching design students, a librarian from Mexico and a PhD student who is doing fieldwork in India. At these conferences, there are many people whose work you have read in your studies, and they become important to you. I was looking forward to seeing them and listening to their talks; but I realised that the conference wasn’t only about this. It was also about all the other spontaneous meetings and encounters you would never otherwise have had. In particular, about all the people you wouldn’t have heard of or talked to otherwise.

On making decisions

The moment I got in my hands the conference programme I felt overwhelmed. SO MANY PANELS! Who should I see? The programme was 300 pages long and I needed to make decisions quickly, based on a very practical question; As I couldn’t go to all of them, I had to choose. This process of filtering invoked a reflection on my own interests, forced me to explore them and to ask myself: which panel will you go to now? Further, it helped me to reflect on my own research and what I feel connected too, but also assisted in seeing what other areas I am interested in. Hence, I left with a sense of security for what I want to pursue (at least in the near future) – the conference functioned as a filter through which I became more focused, grounded and content.

In the past, I have had many discussions with other students about our academic paths. STS offers so many interesting avenues of study that, when choosing a Master’s thesis topic or a PhD topic, it is easy to feel restricted by the need to pursue just one topic. There is a loss involved when you are interested in so many things but have to choose just one. At least, this is a feeling that I have had many times. For me, the conference offered a space where I could navigate my several interests and get the chance to explore them further. I got to hear talks and discuss them with people, see what they are currently working on, coming to understand if I could see myself researching these topics and approaches.

Of course, while there are many good reasons why Master’s students could benefit from conferences and their indeterminate encounters, there are also a number of obstacles potentially in the way of them being able to do so. These days, being granted a visa can be a problem faced by academics, Master’s students included. From personal experience, I know at least one person who couldn’t join the EASST conference due to visa issues. Finance can also be a considerable barrier, despite fee waivers being awarded to applicants. Are both Master’s and PhD student’s considered to be in the same category when fee reductions are considered? PhD students often get funds to go to such a conference whilst Master’s students don’t; so categorizing these groups as the same may disadvantage Masters students. However, such issues touch beyond the EASST conference and beyond the STS community as such.

Food-for-thought and collaborative survival

Taken together, these comments are offered as food-for-thought, for practices of inclusion within the STS community. The STS scholar and activist Max Liboiron writes about running a feminist environmental science lab, in which the values of equity (not equality) and humility are the center². Could STS conferences turn into spaces of resistance? Could STS conferences become the mushroom of Ana Tsing’s book that gives us new imaginations for collaborative survival? Perhaps it is too much to ask from a small field of STS, but for now one thing is sure: Master’s students have much to benefit from attending such conferences, just as much as the field of STS has to benefit from such students being there: they help building the community, challenge the traditions and assist in creating new spaces for an ever-expanding field.

1. Tsing AL. The Mushroom at the End of the World?: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press; 2017.
2. Liboiron M. How to titrate like a feminist. https://civiclaboratory.nl/2019/05/26/how-to-titrate-like-a-feminist/. Accessed May 31, 2019.

This blog post was originally published in EASST review. However, the version at hand was overworked by the original author, featuring additional theoretically-based reflections.

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Artemis Papadaki Anastasopoulou is a PhD student at Department of Science & Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. Her academic interest lies in the political dimensions of materiality with a focus on the case of plastics. Additionally, she cares about issues of inclusion and community building within STS and beyond.

by Sonja Steinbauer

“Whether jeans buttons, ceiling lights, beverage cans, coffee capsules, rooftops, cars or airplanes – aluminum is an integral part of our everyday lives. But what we always like to forget is that the raw material aluminum comes from the earth and its extraction strikes deep wounds in the landscape”, Global 2000 stated this year. Aluminium is the third most common element in the earth crust. It is an integral part of our everyday life and is used in construction industry, cosmetics or medicine. Nonetheless, this material has recently become the focus of critical investigations due to possible health risks or its mining conditions. This ambivalent views about aluminium were central in the STS-course “Science in Society Laboratories”. In the following poem, I describe the investigations my research group and I made during this seminar about aluminium and its implications concerning environment and health.

Aluminium, aliminium what a glittering material,
or just a killer in serial?

How to deal with it, how to cope,
is there any hope?

As this seems to be a rather complicated case, it
was often assessed,
and is here further addressed.

The theme was outspread through television,
science and news,
rightly, cause there are many connected issues.

Like possible health risks or environmental problems,
to name just some of them,
these are assessed further in this poem.

Let’s start by the Enviroment,
medial this topic is often completly absent.

Many indigenous people are threatened by mining,
companies,
experiencing personal tragedies.

Crop failure, polluted water and toxic bauxite are
problems going on,
in fact, to name just some.

But what do the companies do, what do they say,
to the people standing in their way?

We build you hospitals and give you streets,
but that’s not fitting to the peoples’ needs.

Communities not based on that,
causing social problems and therefore being a
threat.

Curing diseases they have caused,
their greed cannot even by NGOs or laws get
paused.

So there is only one thing to say,
dear companies, stop the greenwashing right away!

And the other ones to react are who,
or better said, what can we as consumers do?

Of course, less consumption means less production,
but the consumers reaction shouldn’t be the only
action.

Production processes in this case are very foggy,
and the consumer side alone really groggy.

National and international Actions need to be set,
so that goals concerning a better future can be met.

But the environment is not the only issue that needs
to be discussed,
giving an overview on possible health risks is a must.

Some say breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease,
stimualted by aluminium, would increase.

This is among others connected to aluminium in
cosmetics,
a question concerning consumer and production
ethics.

Antiperspirants were discussed the most,
is the aluminium in it the toxic if overdosed?

But what do scientific researchers say,
can they give a path or lead a way?

Studies are rare,
to make statements, they often don’t dare.

Scientific standards getting disregarded,
like studies with only two participants, to name a
target.

Only one assessment of humans was ever made,
and accumulated to the body aluminium still has an
uncertain fate.

The less problematic aluminium seems to be in food,
if taken up that way, it gets digested just the normal
route.

But concerning skin absorption or injection,
nobody can really declare the body’s reaction.

Furthermore, this uncertainty lets risky decisions
grow,
people not getting vaccinated in a row.

These determinations being taken,
even if the positive effect predominate, people
come on and waken!

Immunology said it’s unlikely for the named
disease,
that aluminium can cause it or increase.

Multi-layered indeed are Alzheimer’s’ and breast
cancer,
as many scientists will answer.

But only if aluminium does not have a direct effect,
does not mean that the body doesn’t react.

If you are already ill indeed,
caution about aluminium is what you need.

If you have serious problems with your kidney,
too much aluminium can be deadly.

If you have breast cancer to name a specific,
disease,
aluminium can work as xenoestrogen, which
stimulates the cancer to increase.

But by all these uncertain believes,
what about alternatives?

Concerning cosmetics, it is clear,
aluminium free products are on the market, if you
fear.

Especially alternative adjuvants are not even rare,
but companies don’t want to pay the fare.

To that theme I just say: Come on,
with safer options everybody would have won!

Alternatives definitely need to be staged,
and research due to uncertainties engaged.

Aluminium is a multi-layered theme,
concerning environment and health to name the
topic supreme.

As this poem is nearly past,
I make some statements at the last.

Aluminium production needs to become safe,
mandate mining companies to behave.

Better alternatives need to be chosen,
developments not because of financial issues frozen.

Research needs to be stimulated
and not unavailable knowledge simulated.

The theme aluminium is complicated indeed,
but with the right decisions, for fear there is no need.

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Sonja Steinbauer is a master student at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. Because of her other educational experiences (Bachelor in African Studies and Oriental Studies, Master in Theatre-, Film and Mediahistory), she was attracted by the interdisciplinary course “Science in Society Laboratories”, where she had the chance to encounter ‘the health risks of Aluminium’ together with students from various fields and get an insight into cross-curricular Research. Find more Information on the “Science in Society Laboratories” course on our website: https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/lehre/science-in-society-laboratories/

by Diana Peutl

“If a bear sees me naked, you can’t get jealous” is what Linda Belcher explains to her husband in the episode ‘A River Runs through Bob’ of Fox-financed cartoon series “Bob’s Burgers”, which takes the animated family onto a weekend trip to a National Park. Having most of my conceptions regarding the world beyond my personal experience forged by such instances of Anglo-American media culture, child-me was quite disappointed to learn of the absence of bears and wolves in Austrian wildlife. However, through years of school field trips to zoos, parks, recreational areas, and protected zones – as well as by bearing in mind ‘problem bear’ Bruno’s fate – adult-me had acquired a notion of Flora and Fauna as not necessarily shaped by what is communicated as desirable, but what is decided to be practicable. Hence, National Parks as institutions seem to me as situated right in-between those two rationales, having to carefully balance vast abstract concepts of ‘nature preservation’ and concrete pragmatic approaches in their practices of work. In the following, I want to delineate how the excursion to the Lobau National Park ‘Danube Floodplains’ against the backdrop of the STS-course “Environment, Risk, Society – Science, Technology and Nature in times of the Anthropocene” by Dorothea Born gave me the most-recent opportunity to reflect upon my own conceptualization of ‚nature‘, as well as enabled me to zoom into the everyday practices of work at play in ‘doing’ and ‘narrating’ a National Park.

Last April, we started our visit to the National Park ‚Danube Floodplains‘ just outside its borders, by being welcomed in the so-called ‘National Park House’. Consisting of a cinema, bureaus, lavatories and an outside playground, this place seems to play the role of a communication hub, fostering exchange between visitors and park managers. Our tour began with two Park rangers separating the waiting multitude into our course group and a class of pre-schoolers, each getting different outlooks on their respective tour programs. Without further ado, we were led into the projection room to start our excursion into the National Park by strolling down a cinematic path.

In hindsight, this image film facilitated the most acute immersion into the institution’s self-depiction our tour could offer. While the trees on the nearby Danube Island do not differ noticeably from the ones located in Lobau, the insight provided by personal accounts of the guiding national park manager varied strikingly from the triumphant mood-setting offered by said PR-language-riddled welcoming video. From a conceptual angle, I would argue that these differing communication styles point us towards practices of work crucial to the localized understanding of how ‘nature’ and its ‘preservation’ is to be handled within and by the National Park Danube Floodplains: While ‘doing National Park‘ in terms of enabling its continued existence consists of administering complex relationships of legal bodies, consultation/decision processes, public attention, and labour power, ‘narrating National Park’ caters to more romantic and heroic concepts than mere brand management and is thus appealing towards an emotional dimension.

In order to be seen as worthy of protection, elements of ‘nature’ like specific species or territories need to be noticed as well as advocated for – if a species goes extinct and nobody notices, has it ever existed? Imaginaries of responsibility, maybe even reparation of humanity’s megalomaniac abominations against its feeble environment may act as motivation for preservative aspirations. After all, a national park is man-made like everything one works on with (a) certain intention(s) in mind. Referring to David Demeritt’s overview on constructivist conceptualizations of ‘nature’, I’d like to accentuate the option “of understanding ‘nature’ as an ontologically contingent and socially constructed phenomenon” (2001, p. 37).

Tracing the political effects of (de-)constructing preservative areas such as ‘national parks’ from this very understanding, one has to carefully consider the following questions: Who communicates how and what about the construct ‘national park’? How do these speech acts then touch upon practices, power, decision-making and institutions? And where and why is it about ‘nature’ as essence, as a “linguistic [opposition] to that which is said to be cultural, artificial, or otherwise human in origin” (Demeritt, 2001, p. 32)?

The deconstruction of ‘being’ into ‘doing’ is a practice of enabling and empowering by installation of contingency. Looking back upon the many points leading up here in favour of a pragmatic approach to political notions of environmental protection, it is not my intention to negate the affective and/or imaginative dimension at play. Rather, I want to pinpoint utopias and desires, respectively their role as complementing methods of constructing contingency, as a fruitful realm for further research in the context of National Parks and beyond.

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Diana Peutl is an undergraduate student at the Department of Sociology at University of Vienna. Having spent her late teens managing projects in the field of international youth exchange/regional sustainability, Mag. Born’s course ”Environment, Risk, Society’ at the Department of Science and Technology Studies was her first time to look at ‘nature’ in an academic setting.

by Kaya Akyüz

Recently, I have learned that a genetic genealogy platform had been used by the US justice system in order to find a serial killer. My genome was one of the hundreds of thousands on this platform that allowed the investigators to spot the killer and as users of the platform, we have learned about it only after the press reported on the issue. Should genomic data in genealogy or personal genomics databases be used to simply catch a criminal or for similar purposes?

We are giving out data all the time willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or without even noticing. Our faces and license plates get recognized by cameras on streets, consumption habits are recorded, GPS signals are tracked and many more. Sometimes this is for “the public good” as in the case of surveillance for security and often it is for commercial purposes. However, the majority of these different forms of data collected resemble each other in that they originate from an individual: individual´s behavior, preferences, environment or social network. One other form of data that is increasingly produced in large amounts is genomic data in the numerous databases that function as biobanks and repositories for genetics research. The genomic data landscape also includes direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics companies (e.g. 23andMe) to which millions of users send their spit to learn more about their traits, ancestry, health risks and biological relatives.

Everyone has a unique genome and when sequenced, it can be converted into a text of approximately 3 billion characters with four letters: G, C, T, A. Genome as data is different than other types of personal data because it does not simply originate from an individual, but bits and pieces shared by many different people come together through reproduction. While all humans carry almost the same genome sequence, the remaining minuscule differences increase as one moves away from the closest relatives to distant relatives, including each and every one of 7.5 billion people on earth. This way, genomic information allows an individual, e.g. an adoptee, to identify unknown biological relatives; however, it also means that an individual can never be anonymous unless all (close) biological relatives of the individual anonymize their genomic data. I will exemplify this with the controversial case mentioned in the beginning and explain why there is a need for urgent societal discussion about what “personal” data means and who is to decide, when we consider the human genome.

Along with genome editing in human germline using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, the most controversial biotechnological application in 2018 is probably the identification of the Golden State Killer, who is claimed to be responsible for 13 murders and numerous rapes in California in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the DNA had been collected from the crime scenes, the perpetrator had not been identified because his profile was not in the databases. With the help of the genetic genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, named one of the ten people who mattered in 2018, the US justice system opened the doors to a debatable practice. The investigators produced a genome profile of the Golden State Killer from decades old crime scene material and then they uploaded it to an “open access” genealogy platform: GEDmatch. Customers of different genealogy companies (i.e. 23andMe, AncestryDNA, FTDNA and others) have been uploading their raw genomic data to GEDmatch in order to identify biological relatives that are in the databases of other companies, without needing to buy their services. The authorities used this opportunity to identify the closest relatives of the suspected perpetrator and tracked back the suspect through constructed family trees and common ancestors to a person, who happens to be a former police officer: Joseph James DeAngelo. And this is only the beginning. According to Nature and the New York Times numerous cases are underway with a similar approach. A rapidly growing cottage industry is emerging between genetic genealogy and criminal investigations without a chance to publicly discuss what this means for the ordinary individual, her genomic data, privacy and anonymity, especially considering that this system is amenable to many uses beyond identifying serial killers. As long as there is a biological sample and the identity of the owner is to be found, the system visualized below would serve the purpose.

How was the suspected Golden State Killer identified using an open genealogy platform? With a simplified visualization of the process, here I show how shared ancestral genomic variations (noted with colors) allow finding links between an unidentified individual (using left tissue, in this case from crime scene, but possibly from a door handle, a glass etc.) and self-identifying individuals on an open genomic database without knowledge of either.

Identification of a notorious criminal does not leave enough room to discuss the ethical considerations around the use of ordinary individual’s genomic data; besides, who would (dare to) be against a system that allows to track down a serial killer? If it were not for the lax policies of GEDmatch regarding the use of genomic data of its users, the Golden State Killer had not yet been identified. After all, there are numerous databases that are bigger than GEDmatch, but a similar search in these would generally necessitate a court order due to policies of these public or private institutions. As a person, who has his genome data on GEDmatch since many years for genealogical purposes, I find it ethically unacceptable that law enforcement agencies uploaded crime scene material and used hundreds of thousands of profiles to find the relatives of the criminal, followed links through their lives, all of which took place without the users of the platform being informed.

The controversy seems to have become a breaking point in our understanding of genome data and anonymity. Science reports that a sample that encompasses only 2% of the American adult population (only four times that of GEDmatch) would allow 90% of Americans to be identified even if they have no genomic data in any database (60% is already identifiable with GEDmatch). This means uploading one’s own genomic data to such a database with real name or similar identifiers is no longer a mere personal decision unless the individual accepts being a “genetic informant” in searches that may lead to stigmatization of innocent individuals, risk legal protection against discrimination or even out the identities of distant relatives, who may be a sperm donor, an undercover agent, an “anonymized” individual who took part in a biomedical study, or just a person who drank from a glass in a restaurant followed by a stalker.

Waiting for individuals to anonymize their genomic data seems to be an option out of this problematic path. However, this means that those who decide not to anonymize their genomes, decide at the same time not to allow their relatives to anonymize themselves. If we are concerned about our anonymity, we have to push forward global regulations that encompass all platforms, companies or biobanks to remove identifiers attached to genomic data such as names and last names, year or place of birth, at least in a way that protects anonymity unless there is a court order. Otherwise, this is the end of anonymity as we know it. The post-genomic future holds numerous risks along with opportunities and we have to be aware that seemingly personal decisions are made on others’ behalf, often unbeknownst even to the person making the decision.
So the question is, is it “my genome, my decision” or “our genome, our decision”?

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Kaya Akyüz is a PhD student and uni:docs fellow at the Department of Science and Technology Studies of University of Vienna. Having finished his bachelor and master’s studies in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Bogaziçi University, his current research is on the dynamics of making and unmaking a new field in science through the case of genopolitics, an emerging research field at the intersection of political science and genetics.

by Paul Trauttmansdorff

In what ways do ignorance and non-knowledge shape social and political action? This was roughly the overarching topic that brought together different scholars at a two-day workshop at the University of Vienna in November 2018, discussing related issues such as risk, ignorance, contingency, secrecy in social and political life. Bringing the debate to a public setting, sociologist Matthias Gross from the University of Jena lectured in the “Old Chapel” of the University of Vienna about the question what role non-knowledge plays in evidence-based politics. The panelists, Ulrike Felt, Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies (University of Vienna), and Stefan Böschen from the Humanity and Technology Center at the Aachen University (RWTH), as well as moderator and co-organizer Katharina Paul (University of Vienna) were tasked to elaborate on the various forms of ignorance and its related practices. Why then should we study ignorance today?

Probably one of the most notorious examples of how ignorance affects politics is Donald Rumsfeld’s statement at a press conference in 2002, at which he pointed to the realm of what cannot be known about weapons of mass destruction manufactured by the Iraqi regime. He thus mobilized ignorance: “There are known knowns […], we also know there are known unknowns; […] But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know”. Some may call this circumventing a lie, but the public performance of ignorance certainly served a strategic purpose. As studies on ignorance emphasize, strategic ignorance is not about conspiracy theory, but about how ignorance can be characterized as a productive/destructive force by itself; it can be exploited, nurtured, and performed in different forms.

D. Rumsfeld provides a fine example for the increasing salience that ignorance and nonknowledge have acquired over the past two decades. He even contributed to labelling the growing field of ignorance studies “Rumsfeldian”, which not only sounds unlucky, but probably also conceals its interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse character (McGoey, 2012, p. 7). At the panel, Gross presented the issue in a quite broad way, in which he seemed to underscore the essential importance of non-knowledge in structuring our societies. Among the examples he pointed to were the role of the secret (for Georg Simmel one of the big achievements of human mankind); lack of knowledge(s); fake news and disinformation; the unequal distribution of knowledge for divisions of labor; the conscious rejection of knowledge (“ignorance is bliss”). Gross did not aim to present a comprehensive typology or clear-cut definition of non-knowledge, which, in fact, would be classic controversies at any conference of ignorance studies (Gross, 2007, p. 743). Rather, he used his keynote speech to generally demonstrate the need for finding better ways to acknowledge and register not-knowing in contemporary society and political governance.

In their response to Gross, both speakers Ulrike Felt and Stefan Böschen drew on a variety of examples for the makings of knowledge/non-knowledge in our increasingly complex, techno-scientific worlds. In Böschen’s account, the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), as a hub for producing scientific and political expertise on climate change, is confronted with the challenge to specifically select from hundred-thousands of articles for a single special report. Böschen wondered how they possibly deal with the production of non-knowledge that this selection included? How transparent and reasonable should the sorting according to criteria and indicators be made? Does this selection process undermine the institutional authority to constitute knowledge, e.g. given that climate science sceptics attack it on that basis?

Science and Technology Studies (STS) have a long tradition in exploring questions about the messy and complex processes that involve the establishment and institutionalization of scientific facts. Scholars have criticized the “black-boxing” of knowledge-production, which always entails powerful acts that designate authority over knowledge and implicate decisions about what is (un)worthy to know. The making of knowledge, and its flipside ignorance, is not necessarily a rational undertaking, but often charged by controversies and underpinned by values, norms, interests, politics. An interesting question is how to draw on this body of work when it comes to climate change politics? Ava Kofman, in a New York Times article, recently portrayed STS scholar Bruno Latour within the current politicization of climate science, a political moment, which actually reveals the role of “all-too-human networks” that are needed in support of or to stabilize scientific knowledge. For Latour, the point is that the problem of denialism will not be solved through presenting ever more data, because what should count as valuable knowledge and what should be ignored, cannot be determined by scientific facts alone. Or, in other words, scientific knowledge and political order are entangled and co-produced (Jasanoff, 2004).

For Ulrike Felt, it is also big data projects and the build-up of large-scale digital infrastructures in policy areas, such as the health sector (“digital health”), that call for a much broader reflection on what she calls “translation steps”. These would include various layers implicit in knowledge-making, from information gathering to acts of responsibility. Today, the need for collecting, storing, and processing (personal) data seems to be presupposed, and often it is far from clear who is entitled to decide on translating information into knowledge, and knowledge into responsible action. Normative visions and social imaginations are inscribed into digital infrastructures, but hardly ever (publicly) debated. It seems that the dominant imperative of big data collection has grown faster than our capacity to formulate societal and democratic ideas about what kind of knowledge we actually want to gain, who should act upon it, or what kind of responsibilities could emerge from it. Felt’s plea for a better reflection of what has been set in motion confirms the worries about these relatively new aspects of not-knowing that come along with big data systems.

Surprisingly, the current “crisis of evidence-based politics” was largely absent from the panel discussion. As one participant put it, what can be said about the visible forms of ignorance that we observe today in politics? The rise of political figures like Trump has fueled much debate about “post-facticity”, but it could also lead to think more in-depth about the relation between political government and “radical ignorance”, to paraphrase sociologist William Davies. As Davies argues in another New York Times article, America’s president but also the Brexiteers deeply resent the very idea of political governance based in technical and complex facts to solve “prosaic problems”. Governmental issues such as the multilateral governance of climate change or Brexit as “soft” separation of the UK from the EU rely on technical expertise and officials to subsume the unknown, a vision that nationalists across the globe reject. This type of radical ignorance aims at disrupting the link between expert knowledge and political governance as technocratic, regulatory and often global affair, and instead corresponds to their reactionary claims to reassert (state) sovereignty and nativist appeals to the “nation”.

Issues of knowledge and ignorance are thus not only entangled with questions of what power consists of, but also with the question of how political government can or should be envisioned. As relational, rather than stable categories, they become rearticulated and renegotiated in political decision-making and social struggle. Studying the practices of knowledge/ignorance means to look into what is deemed as worth knowing and what is not. And it can also lead to explore the ways in which political government, democratic authority, and social responsibilities are imagined.

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References:

Gross, M. (2007). The Unknown in Process: Dynamic Connections of Ignorance, Non-Knoweldge and Related Concepts. Current Sociology, 55, 742-759.

Jasanoff, S. (2004). States of Knowledge. The Co-Production of Science and Social Order. London: Routledge.

McGoey, L. (2012). Strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance. Economy and Society, 42(1), 1-16.

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Paul Trauttmansdorff is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. His current project examines digital technologies and socio-technical systems in the European border regime and is situated in the intersection of STS and Critical Security Studies.

by Nina Witjes & Michael Clormann

The image of “Starman”, the astronaut-dummy floating in his cherry red Tesla car through outer space has been all over the media earlier this year. The image was taken from a camera that sits on the car’s dashboard, capturing the dummy, the Earth and a sign on that reads „Don´t Panic”. Both the car and the dummy are a powerful symbol of commercial claim towards space in the age of “New Space”. New Space, a term widely adopted within the aerospace industry, signifies fundamental changes in how we use and relate to outer space: Not only does its goal of commercializing outer space pose a challenging technological and regulatory endeavor, it also introduces new structures, practices and organizational forms of exploration, exploitation, and excitement – in short, a new techno-politics of orbits and outer space. When Starman was put into orbit by SpaceX’s new Falcon Heavy rocket, the impact on the global space community was profound; start-ups, media and government actors alike indulged in an enthusiastic discourse on the promises of commercial space exploration; for space tourism science, business, and to, eventually, becoming multi-planetary.

Recently, art has claimed a place in space, too. Trevor Paglen, an artist/activist/researcher known for his work on surveillance and secret intelligence sites, is preparing and announcing to launch a small satellite able to transform into a highly reflective sculpture once it reaches low earth orbit. As soon as crowdfunding allows, the “art satellite” is supposed to launch. The project, in collaboration with the Museum of Nevada, states that „[a]s the twenty-first century unfolds and gives rise to unsettled global tensions, Orbital Reflector encourages all of us to look up at the night sky with a renewed sense of wonder, to consider our place in the universe, and to reimagine how we live together on this planet.“

While it is always a good idea to wonder about humanity and the great and not so great things we did on and with planet Earth, this project – literally – reflects the wrong way. This is, it misses the opportunity to draw attention to many serious issues. In particular that of waste in space. In an interview with PBS , the artist stated that “when I look at infrastructures, and I look at the kind of political stuff that’s built into our environments, I try to imagine, what would the opposite of that be? Could we imagine if space was for art? What would that be? And then I’m kind of ridiculous enough where like, OK, let’s get busy, let’s do that.“

This partly mirrors the attitude of New Space actors like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others, that is, if we can imagine it, let´s do it – and think about the consequences later, if at all (remember: A car in space can be considered media-effective space junk). At the same time, it reveals the ambivalence with which the space sector approaches its legacy: The remnants of decades of spaceflight activities have left an ever-growing and, by now, a dangerously dense pile of rocket components and defunct satellites in earth’s orbits. This so-called “space debris”, threatening space infrastructures around it, is what many in the aerospace sector now call Paglen’s art project, too.

Not unlike the framing of climate change and marine debris as a socio-material risk of global impact, the worst-case scenario concerning space debris predicts a likely future, where the planet’s orbits are becoming permanently impenetrable to astronomical observation as well as any form of space travel leaving or revolving the planet. That is if no countermeasures are taken. Imagined as a cascading phenomenon of colliding, shattering and thus self-multiplying debris fragments, this scenario evokes immediacy through the identification of a point of no return, again, not unlike the one associated with climate change.

From an STS perspective, we agree with Paglen, that one of the main reasons why space policymakers are still slow to respond to the growing threat of space debris is that it has been largely invisible, as it is “easy to forget these all-but-invisible activities“ taking place in outer space — out of sight, out of mind. However, it is hard to imagine that the orbital reflector will change the way we think about space as a place by „making visible the invisible“, neither in terms of responsibility nor sustainability. Here´s why:

At the time when Paglen began working on the project, concrete fears of space debris had surfaced in public perception through two major and highly visible events in outer space: In 2007, China deliberately destroyed its “Fengyun-1C”, satellite in low orbit, an event heavily criticized as having unnecessarily released large amounts of small fragments of space debris. Two years later, we witnessed the first ever accidental collision of two communication satellites, Cosmo 2251 and Iridium 33, causing over 140.000 pieces of space debris in total.  This year, the Chinese space lab Tiangong-1 became a matter of international security concern: From the point when the space station was announced obsolete and defunct by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), the school-bus-size station´s uncontrolled descent appeared as a matter of nightmares for many as its re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere could only be vaguely predicted. The orbital reflector, with its reflective artwork deployed, will be double the size of it.

Instead of making the invisible visible, the Orbital Reflector (as well as any other shiny satellites, floating cars or just the usual clutter in outer space) might be part of the problem: Being in the way of science to gain a clear view of the universe as they limit a telescope’s ability to accurately envision the cosmos and measure its stars.

Jonathan McDowell, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently told Gizmodo that launching bright satellites with no other function than art, fun or prestige into orbit, is „the space equivalent of someone putting a neon advertising billboard right outside your bedroom window”. Paglen recently responded to the criticisms, asking why it would be any more of a problem for stargazers than any of the other hundreds (soon to be thousands) of satellites due to launch every year? Well, after all, it is this kind of thinking about the responsibility that has led to severe environmental issues. Regarding the role of art in space and the fact that the Orbital Reflector will revolve around the Earth without any specific scientific or military goal, Paglen asks his critics why “we (are) offended by a sculpture in space, but we’re not offending (sic!) by nuclear missile targeting devices or mass surveillance devices, or satellites with nuclear engines that have a potential to fall to earth and scatter radioactive waste all over the place?” But is this really the case? After all, it has long concerned social sciences how to make infrastructures visible and how to deal with the sociotechnical vulnerabilities of any techno-society. In particular, researchers in science and technology studies and critical security studies have shown an emerging interest in questions of surveillance from and the increasing militarization of outer space as well as the risks these and their byproducts pose for the sustainability of earthly and space infrastructures. Discarding the Orbital Reflector as a bright idea should not be understood as a rejection of art concerned with and located in space, but of the claim that if the military can launch satellites, art should, too.

Simultaneously, critical debates about the role of art in space are not necessarily in favor of or naive about governmental space technologies. There are civil society projects, too, that use satellite images for monitoring human rights violations and war atrocities – often operating on a shoe-string budget. Many of them would probably be happy to see the 1.3 million dollars estimated for the construction and launch of Paglen´s activist art project to impact their activities. Instead, its contribution will be to shed light on places that are currently in the dark – not metaphorically speaking in terms of human rights but just because it´s nighttime.

Space has become a place where sustainability is increasingly negotiated as an issue of security, as billions of people around the world rely on space systems to facilitate their daily life, from navigation to environmental services, from science to communication, crisis response and banking, from intelligence to education. Space debris poses the question of how we want to live with our material leftovers revolving “above” of us. Another bright and shiny useless satellite in orbit does not provide a good answer.

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Nina Witjes is a university assistant (post doc) at the Institute for Science and Technology Studies at Vienna University. Her work is situated at the intersection of STS and International Relations with a special focus on space programs and security.

Michael Clormann is a doctoral candidate / research associate at the Friedrich Schiedel Endowed Chair of Sociology of Science and the Munich Center for Technology in Society at the Technical University of Munich.

by Ulrike Felt, Maximilian Fochler, Andreas Richter, Renée Schroeder, Lisa Sigl

This text is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers in the life sciences and science and technology studies (STS) at the Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice at the University of Vienna. A shorter version of this blogpost was published as an opinion paper in Times Higher Education.

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The understanding that science creates essential resources for our knowledge societies, both for economic growth and for responding to changing grand societal challenges is deeply rooted in diagnoses of our time. Ideas have gained traction that science should be done in ways that respond to societal needs and concerns. However, opinions are divided on how to achieve societal responsibility, particularly within a bottom up curiosity-driven research environment. Universities as institutions have remained strangely silent in this debate, which is so far led mostly by other actors in funding and research policy. This is surprising, since universities as institutions that combine research, education, and caring for “the long-term health” of our knowledge base have a unique position to take a lead in this debate.

Responsibility is a different concept than accountability

Over the past decades, most academic institutions have been re-organised to weave new forms of accountability towards society into academic lives. Scientists are now entangled in tightly knit systems that evaluate their performance and aim to demonstrate their worth to receive public funding. These organizational changes have been framed, mostly by policy makers and research managers, as urgently needed transparency and control. However, the emerging audit culture and the prominent role of metrics increasingly meet concerns. They have been criticised as narrowing down visions of the social value of scientific work, as spurring hypercompetition, as leading to a research governance by data instead of by smart ideas, and they have even been associated with increased mental health problems of academics.

This makes it relevant to note that accountability is different from responsibility. Accountability often limits universities’ contribution to society to a few productivity indicators, and potentially overlooks important core responsibilities of universities towards society. But what are these core responsibilities? And how could societal responsibility be woven into the fabric of universities in sustainable and meaningful ways?

It is time to re-articulate the public value of universities!

In this essay, we present a view from within the university, and a call to re-articulate the public value of universities, along with what we would define as its three core responsibilities: first, they are responsible for research, i.e. for producing new knowledge. Second, they are responsible for educating new generations, not only of academic scientists, but also of highly qualified staff in private and public institutions. And third, this combination of research and teaching implicates a responsibility to care for the body of knowledge that societies can tap into for solving societal problems both today and in the future.

To meet these quite demanding responsibilities, universities have grown and cultivated know-how and skills that warrant broad public support. This unique position however is also a mandate to cultivate a debate about responsibilities of universities towards society, and about how societal concerns and values are represented across different facets of academic life.

We should not mistake societal responsibility with applicability or marketability

In our perception, this debate is currently pursued in ways that are too narrow. Mostly, the public value of universities is located “downstream,” e.g. in potential future applications of the knowledge in the form of marketable products, in the presence of university’s expertise in public debate, in a start-up that a graduate may launch, or in fostering economic growth through highly-skilled human resources. Many so-called “third mission” initiatives are examples for this delegation of responsibility to a later uptake and commercialization of knowledge. This is unfortunate, since it implicitly equates responsibility with a narrow notion of innovation that focuses on marketability.

Universities need a broader notion of responsibility that focuses on diverse forms of societal relevance instead of marketability. Indeed, the study of innovation trajectories has shown that knowledge often benefits society in indirect, complex and unforeseeable ways. Remembering this is particularly important at a time characterized by increasing short-term orientation.

One advantage of such a broad approach to societal responsibility is that it makes visible that even basic researchers are often already motivated or guided by societal concerns — yet not in terms of direct and short-term applications. They may feel that their research is relevant to society, such as for example by contributing to a knowledge base for a certain policy area or for a present or potential future matter of societal concern, such as coping with Climate Change. This explains why calls for protecting scientific freedom against societal interventions often argue that science is most valuable and relevant to society when it is curiosity-driven.

Cultivating a knowledge ecology for creating better futures

Responsibility therefore needs to be understood as cultivating and caring for a knowledge ecology. Using the notion of knowledge ecology instead of knowledge system points to the importance of allowing a breadth and diversity of forms of knowledge, with different temporalities (immediate responses and long-term knowledge concerns) and diverse relations to society, its needs and concerns. This notion should also make us aware of the importance to think in terms of sustainability of knowledge. Knowledge ecologies should thus harbour capacities to address today’s challenges as well as to be prepared for new kinds of problems in the future that we cannot anticipate today.

Being academic scientists ourselves, we often sense that scientific communities have not yet developed a language for fully grasping and communicating the entanglements of their research fields with society. In everyday academic lives, it often even seems difficult to engage in debates about societal relevance. Too many other layers of concern, such as acquiring funding, competing in evaluations and securing continuous employment seem more pressing. All this has to happen in a work environment in which researchers are subjected to multiple and partly contradictory temporal logics, often leaving individual researchers with a lack of time. As an unintended consequence, even though many researchers may be sensitive to societal concerns, universities often do not provide conditions to allow those concerns to enter the processes of planning and carrying out research, as well as the education of new generations of scientists.

Universities have a mandate here to incentivise reflection on societal relevance in scientific communities, to reflect on how institutional framework conditions shape scientific practices and to create opportunities and offer time and space to consider societal issues in scientific practices. In the long run, this should allow universities to participate in the creation and care for a knowledge ecology that allows also in the long-run to address societal issues and challenges. This perspective on universities as core to societies’ capacity to care for a balanced knowledge ecology, is also an opportunity for universities to renew their self-understanding and to gain value and gravity in knowledge societies. Also in the short term, universities, the knowledge they create and their standing in public debates will profit from allowing their researchers to reflect on, articulate and communicate the societal relevance of their research.

But how can universities contribute to creating conditions that allow to consider societal concerns in academic practices? Let’s consider three first steps.

Universities form next generations and their attitude towards societal relevance

First, as higher education institutions, universities should develop ideas on how to build the reflection of societal issues into curricula and bring them to the class room. It is also in teaching environments that universities cultivate an ideal about what kinds of knowledge are worth being taught under current conditions. Currently, how students learn to ask questions is often narrowed down to highly-specialised skills and knowledge, while the ability to reflect on the broader societal meaning often falls short. A study of junior life scientists even suggests that they tend to unlearn to consider societal concerns until they reach more independent positions as group leaders.

Reflecting societal concerns, and one’s own expertise within society, thus is a core competence that needs to be fostered. As academic scientists are key multipliers, universities have a responsibility to build such reflections into curricula and classes. While a variety of inspiring tools and practices are readily available to do so, universities should be aware that there is no one-size-fits-all approach and dimensions of societal relevance are as diverse and situated as scientific fields. The ways in which reflections are built into study programmes (e.g. Master- or PhD-Programmes) should ideally build on a bottom-up debate in scientific communities. Rather than being an extra task that students and lecturers need to fulfil, societal responsibility should become part of the idea of good scientific practice that is transmitted at universities. This should not be felt as limiting an open, curiosity driven approach to knowledge generation, but broaden the basis of what drives this curiosity.

This reflective capacity is particularly important in times in which research and its contexts are rapidly changing. For example, the rise of ‘big data’ poses fundamental challenges to how scientific fields produce knowledge and how they relate to society. Reforming teaching programmes is thus one key to weaving societal responsibility into the spaces in which new knowledge is envisioned and produced. This should become an essential component of academic socialization.

Pick candidates that also care for societal issues

As hiring institutions, universities are key gatekeepers. Appointment procedures of professors thus are crucial moments that have long-term impact on how far societal responsibility will grow into future scientific work. As a second step, to weave societal concerns into academic practice, universities should thus move beyond the accountability rationale in evaluating future professors. In practice, this could mean that reflective capacity should become an important part of the overall qualitative assessment of candidates, taking into account how far respective scientists have learned to reflect on their scientific research field in societal context, and how far scientists are able to pass this on to the next generation of scientists. Further, reflecting societal relevance has an impact on how researchers take decisions in research. This could not only contribute to broadening the notion of excellence, but also bring back into focus the role of academic researchers as educators and multipliers who form the next generation of scientists and high-qualified professionals.

Move towards a plural culture of scientific quality

Third, universities should incentivise reflections on societal responsibility across the spheres of research and teaching. Ideally, this would lead to more open negotiations about guiding values within scientific communities, and about more appropriate ways of evaluating and valuing scientific work in societal contexts. However, reflecting on scientific relevance is most meaningful when closely tied to the respective scientific field, and awareness needs to be present that in different fields, potentially very different societal concerns and values matter.

One of the most challenging tasks for universities is to consider this diversity and to accommodate the plurality of knowledges and values that adds up to the public value of the academic world. Cultivating this plurality means to allow, but also to value and nurture a diversity of scientific quality criteria across fields, and to experiment with forms of evaluation that go beyond narrow concepts of accountability. Most importantly, it should be avoided to subject the value of societal responsibility to an additional standardized metrics, as this might invite a tick-box mentality to address responsibility and hinder researchers to weave societal responsibility into the fabric of their work in more conscious and meaningful ways.

We need cultural and institutional changes that allow to more intuitively relate questions of societal responsibility to dimensions of excellence, in the sense of synergy, not trade-off. While many funding institutions currently seem to handle excellence and responsibility as separate, if not mutually exclusive, universities should challenge this dichotomy and suggest instead that excellence and responsibility are best seen as symbiotic capacities for universities to make a meaningful contribution to societal development.

Where to go from here?

We have just offered a few examples for how universities can reorganise academic life with governance mechanisms that allow scientists to reflect and consider societal issues more explicitly. From their unique position within knowledge societies, universities may want to take a lead in organising exchange with other stakeholders to create societal capacities to sustain a broad enough knowledge ecology to respond to societal challenges, both today and in the future.

In doing so, it is essential to consider that societal issues do not only matter once the knowledge leaves the university, but they should traverse lab spaces, desktops and the minds of researchers. While by no means narrowing down their academic freedom and curiosity, societal engagement fosters the capacity to reflect on the entanglements between science and society and allows scientists to become academic citizens in a fuller sense.

 

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Authors (alphabetical order):

All authors of this paper are members of the Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in Academic Practice at the University of Vienna.

Ulrike Felt is Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Head of the Research Platform. She is, amongst others, president of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, board member of the Journal Responsible Innovation and has published on temporalities of academic life and the challenge of making RRI work in academic environments.

Maximilian Fochler is Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies. He is author of several papers on changing research cultures in the life sciences in academia and biotech companies, with a particular focus on different forms of valuation and evaluation.

Andreas Richter is Professor of Ecosystem Science and Head of the Division of Terrestrial Ecosystem Research. His research interests range from carbon use efficiency of microbial communities to the effect of climate change on soil processes and carbon storage.

Renée Schroeder is Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Vienna. For her research in the field of RNA biology she was awarded amongst others the Special Honor Award “For Women in Science” and the distinguished “Wittgenstein Award”.

Lisa Sigl is postdoctoral researcher at the Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice at the University of Vienna. She has published on the changing governance of life science research, with a focus on labour conditions and infrastructures for commercialization.