The First Day Panel Session is devoted to Reasearch assessment / Science in transition.

It’s keynote speakers are:

• Izabela Wagner-Saffray (Warsaw University)
• Tereza Stöckelová (Charles University, Prague; Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
• Barend van der Meulen (Rathenau Instituut)

 

Closing Panel Session: „Science, Policy, Solidarity, Asymmetries”

Keynote Speakers:

• Patrick Baert (University of Cambridge)
• Andrzej Wojciech Nowak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)

 

Plenaries

Plenary A  Research assessment, science in transition, knowledge policy
Location: Economy, Main Auditory (Aula) and Economy IV (for overflow); Wednesday 16.00

European research systems continue to adopt more formal assessment and evaluation methods. This session discusses the implications of this for the practice of researchers themselves as well as for the policy goals of ‚excellence’ and ‚relevance’. Themes that will be addressed in this session include individual and institutional coping strategies in different disciplinary, institutional and research contexts, a comparison of the landscape of European research system transition, east and west, and ethnographies of formal and informal processes of evaluation in the social sciences. As both actors within and analysts of the changing knowledge system we consider the challenges for our reflexivity and engagement in this process.

Chair: Paul Wouters is the Director of the CWTS (the Centre of Science & Technology Studies) and Professor of Scientometrics at the University of Leiden. He is also a member of the editorial board of Social Studies of Science and a member of the board of the Dutch graduate school Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). He is leading a European Commission 7^th Framework project, ACUMEN, on research evaluation.

 

Speakers:

Evaluating everything – knowing nothing. Knowing everything – evaluating nothing. Solidarity in science in 21st century

Izabela Wagner is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw.

 

European research systems in transition. The discontent of the riches and hopes of the poor

Barend van der Meulen has been a senior researcher with the Rathenau Institute since October 2008. His main area of interest is the dynamics of science and science policy, and the instruments used to formulate science policy. His current research is concerned with the internationalization of science and science policy; and research evaluation, with particular reference to ways in which the social benefits of research can be quantified.

 

Social sciences in the clinch: Between brotherhoods and managerialism in the Czech university environment

Tereza Stockelova is a researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, assistant professor at the Department of General Anthropology, Charles University, and editor-in-chief of the English edition of Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review. Her work is situated in-between sociology, social anthropology and STS. She has ethnographically investigated academic institutions and practices in the context of current policy changes, science and society relations and environmental controversies.

 

Abstracts of the talks can be found at:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst2014/panels.php5?View=%20Plenaries

 

 

Three sub-plenaries run in parallel on Thursday 11.30.

 

Plenary B(a)  Shaping Horizon2020

Location: Economy, Main Auditory (Aula); Thursday 11.30

The EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020 focuses on grand societal challenges. The head of DG Research & Innovation states that these need ground breaking interdisciplinary research with ‘full embedding’ of the social sciences and humanities.

Dialogue between researchers and officials at a recent conference in Vilnius revealed both the opportunities and the difficulties of translating these ambitions into reality. The legacy of ‘science-push’ framing of research agendas remains very tangible. The transdisciplinary experience and capabilities of the science, technology & innovation studies community is underrepresented. There is a need to articulate a broader model of innovation with a participative, reflective approach to define a distinctively European path for research to address societal challenges.

This session offers opportunities for participants involved in the EU framework programmes to proactively shape the emerging Horizon 2020 programme to enable it to fulfil its interdisciplinary social science & humanities aspirations.

Chair: Fred Steward, Professor of Innovation & Sustainability, Policy Studies Institute, University of Westminster, London

 

The session will take the form of a panel discussion involving:

Robin Williams, Director, Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh

Maja Horst, Head of Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

Pierre Benoit Joly, Director of IFRIS (French Institute ‚Research, Innovation, Society’), Directeur de Recherche at the French National Institute for Agronomic Research (INRA)

 

Plenary B(b)  The relevance of the postsocialist condition for STS

Location: Economy, IV; Thursday 11.30

STS has sometimes been accused of ‚presentism': a tendency to study configurations, assemblages, arrangements, sets of material practices that take place here and now, in the present. How would our key concepts, methods, analytical strategies change if we blurred the boundary between the past and the present, the here and the there, and sensitised ourselves to half-presences?

This subplenary aims to address this abstract question by initiating a discussion about the postsocialist condition. With the help of Susanne Bauer (Goethe University, Frankfurt), Emils Kilis (Lancaster University), Ivan Tchalakov (University of Plovdiv) and Marija Brajdic Vukovic (University of Zagreb), we aim to explore remembered and forgotten narratives of modernism, sources of enthusiasm and scepticism towards technoscientific promises, and various configurations of the public and the private in sociotechnical innovations in order to discuss how the concept of postsocialism might contribute to ongoing debates in STS, and vice-versa, how insights from STS might help us better understand the postsocialist condition.

Chairs: Endre Danyi, Postdoctoral Fellow, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Marton Fabok, Doctoral Student, Liverpool University

 

Plenary B(c)  Productive (geo)politics of energy

Location: Economy, VII; Thursday 11.30

The politics of energy today can hardly be pinned down to one particular locality or a category of actors. Rather, we can see that energy politics are spread across various political arenas and scales of practice. One of the issues that contributed to scaling up energy politics is climate change. But also environmental and technological risks of various energy technologies, socio-natural disasters (like the Fukushima disaster or black-outs), and shifting interregional dependencies of supply and demand for energy sources led globally to changes in the dynamics of energy politics.

In this discussion panel we will discuss what the sociological approach to science and technology study has to offer in addressing current dynamics and transformations of energy policy. We will discuss how various issues produce contemporary energy politics. More precisely we focus on changing relations of the social and the technical within the socio-technical (energy-) systems. We will explore new actors in the field of energy and ask if impulses for new social movements or socio-technical assemblages are given by this development. And, finally we will discuss how scales of politics are reproduced by new technologies.

Chairs: Aleksandra Lis, Assistant Professor, Adam Mickiewicz University; Ana Delicado, Research Fellow, Lisbon University

Speakers: Ulrike Felt (University of Vienna); Les Levidow (Open University); Harald Rohracher (Linköping University); Thomas Saretzki (Leuphana University Lueneburg); Gordon Walker (Lancaster University); Gregoire Wallenborn (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

The session is convened by Alena Bleicher (Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research); Piotr Stankiewicz (Nicolaus Copernicus University); Luis Junqueira (University of Lisbon)

 

Plenary C Science, policy, solidarity, asymmetries

Location: Economy, Main Auditory (Aula) and Economy IV (for overflow); Friday, 14.00

In the final plenary session, two distinguished social theorists will reflect on the sociology of contemporary knowledge practices and their relationship with local and global asymmetries and solidarities. In what way can the insights of science and technology studies help to challenge as well as explain the dynamics of technoscientific success and global standardisation in domains from science to economics? Can sovereignty over measurement and accountability be contested at the same time as expressing universal, intellectual and moral solidarity? How has the engagement of intellectuals with their publics changed in the modern era? What kinds of social and cultural capital do public intellectuals need in order to act authoritatively? The discussion will focus on possible answers to these questions, with particular reference to Europe and its diverse/shared geographies and histories.

Chair: Sally Wyatt (former President of EASST 2001-2004) is currently Professor of Digital Cultures at Maastricht University, and Academic Director of the Netherlands Graduate Research School for Science Technology and Modern Culture (http://www.wtmc.eu). She is also the programme leader for the eHumanities group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (http://www.ehumanities.nl).

Speakers:

Solidarity and metrological sovereignty – global asymmetries and political economy of measure

Andrzej Nowak. Institute of Philosophy at Adam Mickiewicz University in Posnan. His current research focus on social ontology, social studies of science and actor-network theory. Also interested in issues of development and underdevelopment, particularly centre – periphery relations in modern world-system. Currently leads a research project on the relationship of knowledge structures and socioscientific controversies. Author of book Agency, system, modernity (in polish) and dozens of scholarly articles, an active participant in public life, occasional columnist, also present in the blogosphere, https://amu.academia.edu/AndrzejWojciechNowak

 

Public intellectuals: Transformations in Positioning

Patrick Baert, Professor of Social Theory at the University of Cambridge. Earlier work focused on the philosophy of the social sciences, and the development of a pragmatist notion of time to enrich social theory. His current work deals with the sociology of intellectuals. http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/contacts/staff/profiles/pbaert.html

 

Abstracts of the talks can be found at:

http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easst/easst2014/panels.php5?View=%20Plenaries