| 1. |
- Arsovski, Slobodan, et al.
(författare)
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Universities, the categorical imperative and responsible research
- 2021
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Ingår i: 19th Annual STS Conference: “Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies”, Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science of the Technical University of Graz, the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ) and the Institute for Advanced Studies of Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS), 3–5 May 2021, Graz, Austria.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Universities, as Western cultural institutions, can look back on a long development spanning several centuries. In terms of cultural significance, this puts them into the same league as the church, the state or major banks, to mention but a few. In our modern world of increased globalization and digitalization, universities are tasked with educating an ever-growing number of students. Inadvertently, this also leads to an inflation of the value of academic degrees, let alone to mention the actual quality of the skills that are being taught to students. Governments and other stakeholders are increasingly becoming interested in responsible research and innovation practices. This presentation looks into the consequences of the so called “impact agenda” and what it signifies for the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge. We understand the impact agenda to be the push to evaluate the quality of research based on its outcome (end), compared to its rigor (mean). Departing primarily from research conducted at European universities, we contend that reducing the role of the university to that of mere impact facilitation, accreditation and skills acquisition for its students, may prove detrimental to the respect for the university as an institution. Not only are universities running the risk of underappreciating what they do, but they are also fueling a greater division of society in which the citizenry is trained to use highly sophisticated conceptual tools without being provided the complex understanding needed to wield it competently egged on by research chasing an ever elusive ‘impact’. We argue that the society-wide increase of polarization – fueled by such a dynamic – will increase unless the universities actively acknowledge and embrace their role as shapers and stewards of Western culture. Within our analysis, we discuss the emergent ‘impact or starve’ paradigm to explain why such transgression of the categorical imperative are normalized and not widely publicized and problematized. We reflect both on the individual and collective consequences for knowledge production. Specifically, we draw attention to the unintended consequences that arise when the external value hierarchy of society rewards such an end focused assessment structure in terms of student numbers, research funds, and prestige, which supposedly justifies such ends. Inadvertently, such development ossifies contemporary values in the long term, and devalues the contribution of universities to the development of ideas.
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| 2. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Wicked problems or wicked solutions? Sustainability–differently
- 2018
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Ingår i: Urban Research, Mistra Urban Futures, 18 September 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden..
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Obtaining functional and inclusive societal organization is not a simple matter of ‘doing it’ by subscribing to winning formulae as there are many choices to be made in the process. Given that conceptual frameworks always guide thoughts, judgments and actions, how we relate to ‘sustainability’ specifically becomes relevant if we aim to achieve a more liveable society. It is increasingly appreciated how all societies contain ‘wicked problems’ or socio-cultural challenges that are multidimensional, hard to pin down and consequently extremely challenging to solve. This seminar engages with the consequent need to recognise this complexity by assembling three ‘brave’ takes on far-advanced problems bedevilling conventionally conceptualised paths towards sustainability. Arguing against oversimplification that comes from domination of polarizing concepts and unquestioned practices and rhetorics, the aim of this seminar is to foster explorations into new territories from which we may learn. This involves thinking differently, even if such thinking must sometimes both provoke and cauterise dissent, and revisit divergent ideological standpoints in order not to dismiss out-of-hand ways towards supposedly common goals.
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| 3. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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A wider research culture in peril: A reply to Thomas
- 2021
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Ingår i: Annals of Tourism Research. - : Elsevier BV. - 0160-7383 .- 1873-7722. ; 86
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper calls for greater rigor when it comes to issues relating to research around the ‘impact’ of research impact. It addresses some of its criticisms but also expands on the research program associated with the impact of tourism research. We conclude by addressing the fundamentality of the challenges posed by ‘research impact’. We argue they go to the very core of academic scholarship, as the commoditized neoliberal treatment of impact represents an existential challenge that goes beyond tourism research.
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| 4. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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Conflict resolution within the research ecosystem from an intergenerational perspective
- 2024
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This presentation explores the conceptualization of universities as dynamic "research ecosystems," drawing upon evolutionary and biological metaphors to illuminate the cultural dynamics within these institutions. Acknowledging the limitations of such metaphors (Delanda, 2019), we define the research ecosystem as the milieu wherein academic knowledge production unfolds, with data transformed, legitimized, and narrated into facts by various disciplinary tribes. Our focus lies on understanding how these tribes, encompassing natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, employ stability, universality, and objectivity as rhetorical devices to advance their arguments, despite the inherent flux of these categories intergenerationally. This conceptual research aims to differentiate between three key aspects: firstly, identifying the enduring elements amidst change that enable convincing arguments of continuity; secondly, exploring the factors that mediate change, facilitating a bridge between past practices and present exigencies; and finally, elucidating the ways in which progenitors shape the future trajectory of knowledge creation processes for descendants. Through this tripartite ontological framework, we seek to unravel how cultural practices perpetuate themselves across generations within the research ecosystem. Conceptually, this allows us to methodologically structure our argument, which incorporates cultural practices from the disciplines of geography and tourism studies, as its empirical examples.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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Digitally modeling regional development in Europe : A new methodological approach to policy analysis
- 2013
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Ingår i: Presented at 9th International Conference Man–City–Nature: “Integrated development of cities and regions”, 14–15 October 2013, Toruń, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sustainable regional development faces the complicated task of integrating socio-demographic, environmental and economic goals into a functioning policy proposal. The challenges of the 21st century are further complicated by the new nature of rural-urban relations that render traditional dichotomous approaches counterproductive. The latest EU rural development initiative proclaims itself as a fundamental break from older efforts that primarily focused upon agribusiness. This new humanistic vision includes improved quality of life, environmental sustainability and economic diversification alongside traditional agricultural tenets. New research takes this realization further, expressing a need for new conceptual tools to handle this ‘new rural’ reality seen as a composite of material and social aspects. Since older conceptualizations of the rural as agriculturally dominated might still linger on, the achievement of new humanistic planning goals is a complicated task. Policy planning – a complex actor-network of different interests – heterogeneously engineers different interests into a unified framework. In this case, the major refocus within policy planning, including re-conceptualizations of the ‘new rural’ and the new rural-urban relations, should, accordingly, be accommodated within the actual policy documents. If not, the proclaimed focus of the regional development goals could strike as empty political rhetoric. Due to their size, policies are often summarized. A policy summary should consequently be an unambiguous representation of the policy as a whole. Qualitative summarizations, however, may be problematic due to human biases. To circumvent this problem, this study borrows a technique from the digital humanities called topic modeling. This technique was applied to the framework of EU’s rural development policy for 2007–2013 and compared with the proclaimed development goals. First indications of the analysis show that there are indeed attempts to accommodate these new conceptualizations. However, the primary focus is still on agribusiness. Thereby, the humanistic focus of seeing the rural as more than agriculture-dominated areas does not appear to be strengthened. By adhering to a rationale different than the assumed one, such tendencies may possibly complicate the fulfillment of sustainable socio-economic development goals.
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| 7. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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Extra-scientific factors and the dissemination of (un)popular ideas
- 2016
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Ingår i: 2nd International Scientific Conference Geobalcanica, 10–12 June 2016, Skopje, Macedonia.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates the dissemination of scientific concepts and ideas through a focus on extra-scientific factors. While scientific progress is usually evaluated in terms of intellectual achievement of the individual researcher, we tend to forget about the external factors that tacitly yet critically contribute to knowledge production. While these externalities are well-documented in the natural sciences, social sciences have not yet seen comparable scrutiny. Using Torsten Hägerstrand’s rise to prominence as a concrete example, we explore this perspective in a social-science case – human geography. Applying an STS (Science and Technology Studies) approach, we depart from a model of science as socially-materially contingent, with special focus being put on three extra-scientific factors: community norms, materiality and the political climate. Echoing Annemarie Mol, we conclude it is these types of conditions that in practice escape the relativism of representation.
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| 8. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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Historizing topic models: A distant reading of topic modeling texts within historical studies
- 2013
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Ingår i: Cultural Research in the Context of "Digital Humanities", Proceedings of International Conference, 3-5 October 2013, St. Petersburg, Russia. - Sankt Peterburg : Asterion.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Topic modeling (TM) is a method used within the new ‘digital history’ that represents a data driven methodology that might be closest to fulfilling literary historian Franco Moretti’s promise of making possible ‘distant reading’ of large text quantities. Inspired by this promise, TM has been used for historical studies since the early 2000s and this study provides a survey of the state of the art of TM among historical studies by giving a historical and methodological introduction into the use of TM within historical minded research. TM’s was first being developed for data mining within natural language processing and machine learning in the 1990s and had as its overwhelming benefit its ability to cover magnitudes more of data as compared to traditional methods. The primary topic model used is the Latent Dirichlet Allocation that allows TM to be used as a search function, a quantitative check of intuition or as a summarization tool for large corpora of texts. Having many competing theories and assumptions that are constantly being challenged and developed TM in itself currently represents a very active area of research within computer science. The survey of historical texts take its starting point as the first peer-reviewed historical article in 2006 and end point the publication of the firs research monograph in 2013 and identified 23 historical studies employing TM. To provide a general overview of the field the studies were examined using a distant reading quantitative approach and analyzed according to authors’ academic background, gender, academic seniority and country of academic institution; corpora’s type, language, chronology, and geographical focus. The results showed most authors being junior untenured male researchers, primarily affiliated with US-universities and the texts consisting of a substantial number of non-standard online texts. Despite the application within historical studies TM still comes across as a technology driven approach with majority of authors having a background in technical disciplines. Corpora where primarily focused on English texts with a US or global focus and with an emphasis on recent history. All in all TM appear to an emergent rather than established historical methodology.
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| 9. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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How to write a REF impact case study? Critical discourse analysis of evidencing practices
- 2016
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Ingår i: “Making an impact: Creative constructive conversations” International Conference, 19-22 July 2016, School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper applies critical discourse analysis to scrutinize submissions to the “REF [Research Excellence Framework] 2014 Impact Case Study” platform. More specifically, it focuses on the rhetorical practices used within these submissions to evidence research impact as outlined by the Higher Education Institutions (HEI) within tourism studies. The evidencing practices used within the submissions to Panel 26 (Sport Science, Leisure and Tourism) included quantitative sources and measures (e.g. Google Scholar, citation counts, journal ranking scores, monetary value of research grants, value of policy investment, industry revenue figures, etc.) and implicated ‘high status’-end users (e.g. government bodies, the UN, industry, NGOs) as their main type of evidence. The evidencing of impact did not differ depending on whether the research was of quantitative or qualitative character, neither on the type of research impact claimed. Instead, the disciplining of the epistemic evidencing practices was enforced by the outlined guidelines for submission (verifiable evidence, word count, type of impact). Leaning on Collins and Evans’ (2007) notion of ‘expertise’ used to conceptualize evidencing practices, this paper discusses the implication of such evidencing for an evaluation practice that sets out to assess the quality of research impact. The rhetoric such evidencing evokes, however, is not necessary indicative of the impact claimed. Furthermore, the evidencing practices used within the REF marginalize so-called negative impacts (failures), despite their specific value for research and, consequently, for societal progress at large.
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| 10. |
- Brauer, Rene, et al.
(författare)
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Human geography and the hinterland: The case of Torsten Hägerstrand’s ‘belated’ recognition
- 2017
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Ingår i: Moravian Geographical Reports. - : Walter de Gruyter GmbH. - 1210-8812 .- 2199-6202. ; 25:2, s. 74-84
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Seeing human geography as a nexus of temporally oscillating concepts, this paper investigates the dissemination of scientific ideas with a focus on extra-scientific factors. While scientific progress is usually evaluated in terms of intellectual achievement of the individual researcher, geographers tend to forget about the external factors that tacitly yet critically contribute to knowledge production. While these externalities are well-documented in the natural sciences, social sciences have not yet seen comparable scrutiny. Using Torsten Hägerstrand’s rise to prominence as a concrete example, we explore this perspective in a social-science case – human geography. Applying an STS (Science and Technology Studies) approach, we depart from a model of science as socially-materially contingent, with special focus on three extra-scientific factors: community norms, materiality and the political climate. These factors are all important in order for knowledge to be disseminated into the hinterland of human geography. We conclude it is these types of conditions that in practice escape the relativism of representation.
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