KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTIONS GENDER : an east-west comparative study

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KNOWLEDGEINSTITUTIONSGENDERan east-west
comparative study

• Framing the project
• Ulrike Felt

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We are interested in

• understanding the multiple articulations of
  knowledge, institutions and researchers (gender)
• investigating how institutions of research and
  society at large with its different histories and
  contingencies frame knowledge production while at
  the same time being framed by it
• exploring how policy is structuring research
  while simultaneously imaginaries of the future
  potentials of knowledge as well as of the
  potential futures drives the way these policies
  are articulated

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We are interested in

• Places (the material settings) of research, and
  how they open up or close down possibilities
• Spaces - social and epistemic ones - in which
  collective and individuated ways of working
  emerge and find expression in the multiple forms
  of knowledge produced.
• Institutions and how they frame and imagine
  research as well as the researchers

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Researchers are central

• Investigate how they .
• inhabit the different cognitive landscapes and
  participate in giving shape to them,
• organize their environments and get organized by
  them,
• embody the norms and values of their workplace
  and epistemic culture while at times also
  resisting,
• make and brake social ties, move in and out of
  places.
• are confronted by and share existing but also
  participate in the creation of new myths on what
  it means to be a researcher and working in a
  field.

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Central concept Epistemic living spaces

• it is a space with symbolic, institutional,
  social and physical dimensions delimiting in
  multiple, more or less subtle ways what
  researchers can do/can know in research.
• Notion tries to capture dimensions of a research
  environment such as
• feeling intellectually and socially at home,
• holding an understanding of the often
  non-codified sets of values which matter,
• sharing tacitly a repertoire of practices which
  are seen as adequately addressing the knowledge
  question,
• knowing basic survival strategies
• intertwinedness of the personal, the
  institutional, the epistemic and the political
• both opening up and closing down possible degrees
  of action
• create feelings of being on safe grounds from
  which to start exploring unknown territories
  while at the same time also imposing limitations
• they are giving tacit guidance while
  simultaneously potentially curtailing more
  radical forms of innovation.

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Comparison

• research and analysis was guided by a
  comparative optics as a framework of seeing
  (Knorr Cetina 2002 4) on at least three levels
• Different epistemic cultures (social
  science/biodciences)
• Different national contexts (East/West)
• Gender
• Comparison on a rather aggregated level not
  necessarily systematic
• Aiming to show how
• seemingly universal policy measures create
  rather different forms of multiple realities
• different contexts lead to commonly shared
  problem visions
• carve out through the lense of the three
  analytic foci relevant facets of the relation
  between knowledge, institutions and researchers
  (gender)

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How to deal with gender?

• treat gender as a separate, clear-cut and
  well-delimited category which need simply
  elaboration on each level of analysis
• rather as something vague and indefinite, that
  gleams through many of our observations, that is
  being de- and reconstructed simultaneously in
  different places and at different moments, is
  imposed, performed or refused as explicit
  category
• needs careful reassembling work in order to be
  made visible
• Making use of the broad corpus of feminist
  literature which has drawn our attention to the
  gendered dimensions of working in research, to
  the situatednesses of knowing and to gender as a
  major mode of ordering.

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How to deal with East/West as categories?

• East/West is evidently also not treated as a
  separate, clear-cut and well-delimited category
  which need simply elaboration on each level of
  analysis
• rather as something vague and indefinite, that
  somehow runs through many of our observations,
• being used and denied at the same time
• Opens up/closes down possibilities (reflection on
  the own project)
• geographic and symbolic relational and fixed
• reflects invisible orders (like centre
  periphery)
• channels knowledge flows (e.g. what gets
  translated, .)
• needs careful reassembling work in order to be
  made visible

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Conceptual positioning work

• Epistemic cultures (Knorr-Cetina)
• Notion which captures nicely the strategies and
  policies of knowing that are not codified in
  textbooks but do inform expert practice
• Goes beyond discipline it seems better suited to
  make visible the complex texture of knowledge as
  practiced in the deep social spaces of modern
  institutions. (Knorr-Cetina 2002 2)
• As we are interested in practices as a mode of
  ordering action within knowledge-producing
  contexts withattention to the more symbolic
  components of research work ? epistemic cultures
  seems an interesting and highly relevant concept

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Conceptual positioning work

• Going beyond epistemic cultures
• We also
• Consider the intense framing of research through
  policy discourse and practice, e.g. changes in
  the monitoring and assessment practices
• Reflect the societal imaginaries that penetrate
  the research world
• Take into account the broader institutional
  aspects and
• normative frames, embedded in notions like
  career, mobility, speed, etc.
• We look at machineries of knowledge production
  (Knorr-Cetina 2002) in a much broader sense
  beyond the epistemic focus
• The concept of epistemic living spaces captures
  these complexities

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Conceptual positioning work

• Co-production (Jasanoff)
• Stands for the close intertwinedness of science
  and society and draws out attention to the idea
  that the ways in which we know and represent the
  world (both nature and society) are inseparable
  from the ways in which we choose to live in it.
• living in the world takes in our project at
  least two distinct meanings
• inhabiting an epistemic living space The way
  people chose to inhabit this space would be
  closely intertwined with the institutional
  embedding, with the discursive framing as well as
  with narratives and imaginations about the
  objects they were working with and the knowledge
  to be generated. ?knowledge and its material
  embodiments are at once products of social work
  and constitutive of forms of social life in
  academia.
• researchers being part of society at large
  points to the ways in which contemporary research
  systems are framed by society. Discourses on
  knowledge society, the role attributed to
  research driven innovation in the advancement of
  contemporary societies, the importance attached
  to knowledge work and knowledge workers, all
  these are important forces shaping research.

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Conceptual positioning work

• Mode 1/Mode2 Research (Nowotny, Gibbons et al.)
• Temporality, transdisciplinarity
  Contextualisation of knowledge as a key-concepts
  ? doing away with the politics of doing away
  with politics (Latour)
• Shift from focusing on cultures of science to
  cultures of research ? looking at practieces of
  knowing (Latour)
• Importance of Places (Gieryn)
• geographic location with multiple dimensions
  coordinates on rather different maps being
  organised in our case according to categories
  like institution, building, lab, city, country or
  region perceptions of similarities and
  differences might emerge, become visible and give
  meaning to social organisation, research
  processes and the knowledge produced.
• physicality, which invites to reflect how they
  have been constructed, what imaginations of
  knowledge production are inscribed in them, how
  they open up or close down potential dynamics.
• places come into being because they are named,
  identified and represented.
• Neoinstitutionalism
• Reassembling academis University autonomy
  movement

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Three analytical foci seeing more while
looking at less

• Modes of ordering and boundaries which matter in
  knowledge production
• How are epistemic living spaced delimited and
  internally structured and organised? What are the
  dynamic forces at work? What are essential
  distinctions which matter? What kinds of orders
  are undone, created, performed?
• Working together apart
• thinking research as a kind of work, as
  something people do together and apart it will
  look at mobility and interdisciplinarity as too
  rather strong forces giving texture to epistemic
  living spaces
• Times and trajectories in academic knowledge
  production
• Focus on the plurality of times at work and at
  play in epistemic contexts look at the ways in
  which heterogeneous forms of practice, discourse
  and ordering constitute different times and
  temporalities