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- Convenors:
-
Helena Pettersson
(Umeå University)
Izabela Wagner (Université Paris-Cité URMIS)
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- Chair:
-
Sharon Traweek
(University of California, Los Angeles UCLA)
- Discussant:
-
Sharon Traweek
(University of California, Los Angeles UCLA)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel focus on autocensura in relation to transformations, negotiations and practices of scientific knowledge production and STS. The papers in this panel highlights autocensura as a social and cultural phenomenon, and its part of and impact on methods, paradigms and theoretical challenges.
Long Abstract:
One of the most classic examples of the limitation of academic freedom is the censorship in spaces controlled by authoritarian governments. However, censorship is also practiced within research communities, and also, among single researchers. In this panel, we focus on transformations, negotiations and practices of knowledge production in relationship to STS and the phenomenon autocensura (latin term) (Wagner 2020; 2022, Pettersson 2016).
We invite papers that among other topics address the following areas:
Descriptions and analysis of autocensura practices (in various fields - social sciences, natural sciences and humanities)
Spaces of autocensura - the areas covered by silences (topic covered by it)
Relationship between the status of the researcher and the autocensura practice (precarity and career stage)
The dynamic of political context and autocensura practices
Autocensura in the past - case studies (collective or individual biographies)
Symbolic violence of autocensura
Gender, ethnic, age, family, migration situation, and class factors regarding autocensura practices
Relation to mentors and peers as a frame for autocensura practices.
Autocensura is a sociological phenomenon, part of the process of knowledge construction.
Ideally, the most critical findings are included in academic texts. However, an author/researcher may decide not to publish results (or part of it), despite the high quality of the data and/or the high relevance of the conclusions. (Wagner, 2020: 133). Autocensura is practiced by researchers who are working in various disciplines and in various political contexts (not only under authoritarian regimes) (Wagner, 2022). They may withhold knowledge that might produce transformations, and thus revive questions regarding knowledge production, roles, and commitments, for the research community and society.
In this panel we are eager to focus on the process, its stages, contexts, dynamics, interactions between the author(s) and their milieu, and its impacts on knowledge production, and its impact on methods, paradigms and theoretical challenges.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Izabela Wagner (Université Paris-Cité URMIS)
Short abstract:
Based on the auto-ethnographical and ethnographical data I propose the first categorization of the autocensura, aming that the created frame will help the investigation of this phenomena. I illustrate my talk with examples from such fields as the history, sociology/anthropology, and life sciences.
Long abstract:
When in 2006, Eviatar Zerubavel published his extraordinary book "The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life," he omitted one chapter - about our - researchers/academics - "open secret" which is the existence and broadly spread practice of "autocensura" - self-censorship. If this part of ordinary research work, an element of the knowledge production process, is covered by silence (Wagner 2022) and, to my best knowledge, was not yet the object and subject of academic investigation, we can ask how it is possible that such phenomenon didn't attract the curiosity of researchers, who should deal with it. It is probably because the myth of academic freedom is powerful and autocensura is perceived as the result of unfreedom (or partial lack of it). While this practice seems to be quite evident in dictatorial political regimes in which the universities are not free and academic workers are under political censorship, the autocensura practices seem useless in the occidental democracy. We are supposed to be free academics/scholars.
What if our big censor were ourselves?
Why Two Elephants in our research working spaces? The first concerns our blindness regarding autocensura, and the second is specific to each of us. We all have (some) elephant(s) related to the context of our research (production, reception and content) -- we are influenced/limitted by our "collectif of thought" (Fleck, 1935), paradigms in fashion, business constraint (financial support of research), peer-hierarchical pressures, political correctness - campism, propaganda, and the fear of ostracism and exclusion).
David Kyle (University of California, Davis)
Short abstract:
This paper addresses the intersection of Academic Mobbing, Bullying Mentors, and Citational Mischief (ABC), often leading to paradoxical autocensura to avoid further cooptation and self-erasure, and its impact on unsettled fields of study with a regression toward the uncreative mean.
Long abstract:
Autocensura (Wagner 2022) often takes many subtle forms in academia often involving national, disciplinary, and other epistemic and institutional networks as simply the way one learns to “do business.” However, academic censorship is also shaped by striking events best characterized as an outcome of a toxic stew of a culture of tribal mobbing sensitive to labels and loyalties and entitled bullying by elite gatekeepers. This paper addresses the intersection of Academic Mobbing, Bullying Mentors, and Citational Censorship (ABC), often leading to autocensura--if the target survives personally or professionally. Thus, from mobbing research, there are specific targets, perpetrators, minions, not-so-innocent-bystanders, and naïve collaborators. However, unlike traditional bullying events or institutional mobbing, academic mobbing by elites, take various forms of censorship in how they shape narratives and interpretations of the target’s work within transnational networks they’ve groomed to be weaponized in mostly covert ways, relying on the many backchannels and Janus-faced faux professionality of elite confidentiality and anonymity. If the target survives such a systematic distortion and erasure by powerful gatekeepers (which may largely remain confusing or unknown to them as they simply fail, lose hope, suffer PTSD-related burnout, or never connect the few dots they have), the only means to survival is a kind of paradoxical extreme of walking away while remaining in the academic game to avoid both the mobbing and ongoing self-censorship as anathema to the academic, let alone scientific, project and for one's psychological safety. It is unknown how many walk away from an academic career altogether.
Marcin Zarod (SWPS University Warsaw)
Short abstract:
Researching hacking and security places additional burden on the qualitative researcher. The paper will present three cases I opted for autocensura in the field of STS, surveillance studies and hacking ethnography. Questions will be related to state knowledge, large language models and epistemology.
Long abstract:
Researching hacking and security places additional burden on the qualitative researcher. The paper will present three cases I opted for autocensura in the field of STS, surveillance studies and hacking ethnography. Questions will be related to state knowledge, large language models and epistemology.
In the first question, I will outline the autocensura dynamics between what became publicly known in published papers and even the basic fact of asking some questions. In the second question, I will ask about relation of autocensura and deliberate agnotology in relation to ethics. In the second question, I will make case for cultivated agontology (purposeful un-knowing) of some details from social lives of ethnography participants in the age of large language models (AI) and open data.
As a summary I will show how knowledge from my field translates to wider array of social research and how it links autocensura, sociological reflexivity (Z. Bauman) with security and privacy studies.
Helena Pettersson (Umeå University)
Short abstract:
This paper problematizes ideals and enactments of curiosity in research and the silence and outspoken rules in knowledge producing environments via auto-censorship. How such auto-censorship and curiosity negotiated, and the possible effects, is discussed via 90 interviews with researchers from STEM.
Long abstract:
The aim of this paper is to problematize the ideals and enactments of curiosity in research and the silence and outspoken rules in knowledge producing environments via auto-censorship. In spaces with humans, cultural bound rules, and regulations regarding both research practices within academia are articulated and made visible. Such a phenomenon as autocensura is practiced by researchers who are working in various disciplines and in various political contexts (not only under authoritarian regimes), as commented by Wagner (Wagner, 2022). They may withhold knowledge that might produce transformations, and thus revive questions regarding knowledge production, roles, and commitments, for the research community and society. Academic practices are also intertwined with everyday practices and private life, which regulates and affects academic work but is unspoken. Curiosity can be presented as an expression of positive expectation or as a reason to commit action that appears as the central driving force for learning and invention. It forms an anticipation for information in the individual, and from cultural expectations imposed by the group or society at large. How is auto-censorship and the curiosity negotiated? What are the purposes and possible effects?
The paper includes a discussion on how scientists from three different STEM fields deal with cultural and contextualized norms of such interaction, and how it affects their knowledge practice The paper is based on 90 interviews with scholars from Sweden and the United States STEM field, analyzed through theoretical concepts of cultural analysis, thought style, symbolic capital and knowledge.