Re-disciplining Academic Careers? Interdisciplinary Practice and Career Development in a Swedish Environmental Sciences Research Center Abstract Interdisciplinarity is often framed as crucial for addressing the complex problems of contemporary society and for achieving new levels of innovation. But while science policy and institutions have provided a variety of incentives for stimulating interdisciplinary work throughout Europe, there is also growing evidence that some aspects of the academic system do not necessarily reward interdisciplinary work. In this study, we explore how mid-career researchers in an environmental science research center in Sweden relate to and handle the distinct forms of uncertainty that arise from conflicting institutional and policy impulses. Our material suggests that interdisciplinary academics are often confronted with and at times themselves operate with a surprisingly dichotomous, value-laden view of their research practice. Disciplinarity is primarily associated with the ideals of scientific rigor, while interdisciplinarity becomes conflated with application-oriented work and a lack of ‘theory.’ We also draw attention to the underlying practical dynamics that reproduce this tension and entangle it with the very process of academic socialization. Specifically, we analyze the ambivalent consequences of the various work-arounds that researchers rely on to carve out opportunities for ongoing interdisciplinary research within heterogeneous funding landscapes. These tactics turn out to be undermined by the overriding normative power of formal career incentives at universities, which continue to emphasize the ideals of the individual high-performing academic who publishes in disciplinary journals and attracts the most selective grants. Under such circumstances, the work-arounds themselves become an insidious mechanism that allows researchers to stay in academia but systematically marginalizes their voices and epistemic ambitions in the process.

Pandemic Stories: Rhetorical Motifs in Journalists’ Coverage of Biomedical Risk Abstract This paper argues that journalists’ discursive actions in an outbreak context manifest in identifiable rhetorical motifs, which in turn influence the delivery of biomedical information by the media in such a context. Via a critical approach grounded in rhetorical theory, I identified three distinct rhetorical motifs influencing the reportage of health information in the early days of the H1N1 outbreak. A public-health motif was exhibited in texts featuring a particular health official and offering the statements of such an official as a mechanism of reassurance. A concealment-of-information motif was exhibited in texts emphasizing the importance of the transparency of health officials, and in texts demonstrating ambivalence about information provided by socially-sanctioned sources. Finally, in texts mythologizing the outbreak to the exclusion of other functions of the text (e.g., conveying who is at risk, protective behaviours, symptoms), I identified a pandemic motif. Each motif differs in the conclusions it offers to audiences seeking to gauge relative levels of risk, and to receive information about protective behaviours. I suggest that one means of interpreting the manifestation of distinct rhetorical motifs in the context of a high-risk health threat is the certainty that this context alters moral responsibilities, consequently influencing the manifestation of narrative role.

Science, Politics/Policy and the Cold War in Argentina: From Concepts to Institutional Models in the 1950s and ’60s Abstract This paper analyses how the Cold War influenced the discourses on basic research and on Science and Technology Policies (STPs) of some leaders of the Argentine research community. It explores two key intersections to study the Cold War: the first between politics and policies; the second between the global and the regional/national. The basic assumption is that, just as there was no one Cold War, specific regional and national traits lent specific meanings to basic research. In dialogue with the literature on Latin American history of STPs, on Cold War and on the conceptual history of science, the paper identifies three discursive configurations around S&T: the first refers to the semi-peripheral scientific context; the second is associated with the ‘democracy-totalitarianism’ dichotomy, and the third is linked to the ‘development-dependence’ dichotomy. Finally, the paper also traces some connections between these discourses and the institutional models proposed by different key actors of the research community to implement STPs.

Alternative Facts and States of Fear: Reality and STS in an Age of Climate Fictions Abstract In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies (STS), has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production.

The Rationalization of Korean Universities Abstract The expansion of the higher education system and the rationalization of universities in South Korea, while broadly following the global patterns, reflect the characteristics of the national political system. We show the rapid growth of universities and document core organizational changes among universities: the elaboration of faculty performance evaluation rules, the expansion and differentiation of central administrations, and the emergence of engagement in vision statements. These changes, constructing universities as organizational actors, parallel the changes in higher education systems elsewhere. However, the uniqueness of the Korean experience lies with the role of the state as a catalyst guiding the overall direction and the structure and strategy of universities. We discuss the implications of our research for the rationalization of universities in a highly centralized system.

Enhancing Socio-technical Governance: Targeting Inequality in Innovation Through Inclusivity Mainstreaming Abstract Socio-technical governance has been of long-standing interest to science and technology studies and science policy studies. Recent calls for midstream modulation direct attention to a more complicated model of innovation, and a new place for social scientists to intervene in research, design and development. This paper develops and expands this earlier work to demonstrate how a suite of concepts from science and technology studies and innovation studies can be used as a heuristic tool to conduct real-time evaluation and reflection during the process of innovation – upstream, midstream, and downstream. The result of this new protocol is inclusivity mainstreaming: determining if and how marginalized peoples and perspectives are being maximally incorporated into the model of innovation, while highlighting common problems of inequality that need to be addressed.

Laboratories of Liberalism: American Higher Education in the Arabian Peninsula and the Discursive Production of Authoritarianism Abstract American university globalization has increasingly targeted and been courted by authoritarian states. While the reasons for these partnerships are manifold—including the ease of top-down large-scale monetary investment, “knowledge economy” development strategies, social engineering programs, and other corporate and imperial entanglements—an overwhelming discourse has emerged around higher education initiatives in places like the Arabian Peninsula, China, Singapore, and Central Asia that juxtaposes liberalism (in the form of higher education) with the illiberal, authoritarian contexts it is supposedly encountering within the framework of neoliberal globalization. Through a discussion of American branch campuses in Qatar and the UAE, this article traces a more complex web of actors whose interests may include neoliberal and imperial inclinations but are not reducible to them. By focusing on the discursive framings of these branch campus initiatives, we show how the notion of “liberal education” operates as a global discourse of power through American branch campuses in the Arabian Peninsula and, by extension, other nondemocratic states around the world. Specifically, we argue that the very concept of “authoritarianism” is discursively produced in and through these university projects, and simultaneously builds (upon) an idealized narrative about the national self in the United States that erases existing and emerging inequalities—indeed, authoritarianisms—within the home spaces of American academia.

The Perceived Impact of Eight Systemic Factors on Scientific Capital Accumulation Abstract In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries’ symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the perspectives of system actors located at the institutional, national and international levels to assess the perceived importance of eight systemic factors in contributing to the comparative advantage of social-democratic regimes, namely Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. A deductive thematic analysis performed on 56 transcripts and a one-way repeated-measure ANOVA (and pairwise post-hoc t-tests) performed on 324 questionnaires confirmed the hypotheses regarding the positive influence of academic traditions and internationalization. This study contributes to the development of a varieties of academic capitalism (VoAC) approach to apprehend how political-economies condition higher education systems’ (HES) comparative advantage.

The Closing of Academic Departments and Programs: A Core and Periphery Approach to the Liberal Arts and Practical Arts Abstract Did the liberal art disciplines at American universities have the highest failure rate between the 1970s and the early 2000s? Important theoretical traditions indeed believe that the liberal arts are the most threatened disciplines in the academy, while other theories have differing views. This paper reexamines the vulnerability of academic disciplines by assessing new data. It focuses on the closing of academic departments and programs, and it uses event history analysis to show that practical arts departments and programs failed at a much higher rate than liberal arts departments and programs. In doing so, this paper raises important questions about how American universities are changing during a time of budget cuts and retrenchment.

Journal Peer Review and Editorial Evaluation: Cautious Innovator or Sleepy Giant? Abstract Peer review of journal submissions has become one of the most important pillars of quality management in academic publishing. Because of growing concerns with the quality and effectiveness of the system, a host of enthusiastic innovators has proposed and experimented with new procedures and technologies. However, little is known about whether these innovations manage to convince other journal editors. This paper will address open questions regarding the implementation of new review procedures, the occurrence rate of various peer review procedures and their distribution over scientific disciplines or academic publishers, as well as the motivations for editors or publishers to engage in novel review procedures. It shows that in spite of enthusiastic innovation, the adoption of new peer review procedures is in fact very slow, with the exception of text similarity scanners. For now, peer review innovations appear to be restricted to specific niches in academic publishing. Analysing these niches, the article concludes with a reflection on the circumstances in which innovations might be more widely implemented.