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Long abstract:

This paper delves into the historical and ideological foundations of academia, drawing a crucial comparison between the utopian aspirations of the past and the pressing realities of the present. At the heart of our exploration is Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis," a seminal work that epitomizes the idealistic pursuit of knowledge and scientific inquiry. Bacon's vision serves as a foundational reference point, guiding an investigation of academia's evolution.

The study navigates the complexities of the current academic landscape, critically examining how neoliberal forces have promoted a market-oriented approach to education, research, and knowledge dissemination. Looking to the future, the paper posits that the burgeoning AI revolution presents both challenges and opportunities for transformative approaches within academia.

This exploration seeks to contribute to the ongoing discussion on redefining the role and impact of academia within a continuously changing societal landscape. It underscores some of the key questions posed by this year’s 4S conference theme about the imperative for research that catalyzes change, reigniting debates about the roles, commitments, and methodologies of STS in relation to society. Ultimately, reflecting critically on the past and future visions of academia aids in better navigating the complexities of our work's impact and relevance today, ensuring that our contributions are both meaningful and transformative.

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The publication of several high-impact, yet methodologically flawed studies incited wide-spread controversies in (especially social) science in the early 2010s. A discipline-wide conversation about systemic challenges and (questionable) research practices was refuelled and, as this decade-long intense scrutiny of how research is being conducted is still ongoing, scientists are left with a sense of crisis or, more accurately, crises. Several aspects of science are questioned, including the way we control the quality and dissemination of science (e.g. the publishing system, the peer review system, and the conditions faced by the academic workforce). To highlight a few, there is inequality and exclusivity in the publishing system, a lack of (voluntary) peer reviewers and training, and recent reports highlight the prevalence of burnout, stress, and mental health issues among academics.

In this contribution to the workshop, we first outline some of these issues and prior approaches to them in more detail. Then we use Rockström and Sukhdev’s Wedding Cake Framework (2016) as a basis for an interactive discussion about reconceptualizing the challenges the academic system currently faces. By reconceptualizing these issues with the help of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, we aim to give not just a critical reflection, but also a futuristic vision of what science can look like in an ideal, more sustainable future.

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Universities are complex organizations, composed of academics with shared and competing values. These academic communities are often linked by strong or loose ties to a particular field of study (Sterling, Blaj-Ward, Simpson & Crawford, 2023). Nærgård & Bengtsen (2015) describe academic citizenship as "the intertwining of participation in, engagement between, and mutual responsibility of, universities and society”. Participating, engaging, and taking responsibility for contributing to knowledge production and societal development form various understandings of the concept of academic citizenship. Skjervheim (1996) understands these concepts as different ways of encountering other through language. The role of the researcher encompasses the tasks a researcher has and performs, involving both individual career ambitions and belonging to academic and institutional communities, where researchers share knowledge and resources. Mcflarne (2008) describes how activities related to the concept of academic citizenship often are underestimated and poorly rewarded in academic environments. By identifying new academic career frames and roles, we can investigate how new identity narratives are formed and appear in society. This study aims to examine researchers’ roles. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with researchers from scientific disciplines, tasks related to the researcher role in an energy transition process are identified. What different roles do researchers assume? What expectations are placed on researchers by society? What tensions exist between the different roles? By better understanding the researcher role, we can also develop better strategies to support researchers career development and promote a more holistic understanding of their contributions to knowledge production and society engagement.

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In recent years, researchers in the SoS have deployed Price's (1963) concept to build a complementary list of scientific mechanism theories and emerging metrics based on scientific properties, aiming to reveal unmeasurable scientific structures and mechanisms currently (Wu et al., 2022). However, this seemingly innovative classification overlooks the fundamental distinctions between the two core research objects in STS: knowledge content per se and the production and dissemination of knowledge within the academic collective. Moreover, due to the confusion of the concept of structure and mechanism, many theories and findings are misclassified. These misunderstandings may hinder researchers from more systematic and in-depth consideration of metrics while focusing excessively on identifying empirical characteristics of hidden mechanisms rather than analyzing their varying significance in specific contexts or their relationship with macro structures. Simultaneously, this approach may mislead research institutions, funding agencies, and policymakers to pursue metrics diversity without comprehensive understanding. To address these issues, our perspective piece adopts a sociological lens to reconstruct a structures and mechanisms framework that integrates theories, models, and metrics, reorganizing existing findings in STS based on research objects and basic units of analysis (images, arguments, articles/people, and fields). By employing the analytical paradigm of structures and mechanisms (Zhao, 2022), this study unveils the concealed connections and gaps among previous research, thereby opening the black box from academic collective to scientific knowledge systematically. We believed that better understanding of the underlying structure and dynamics of science also provides a basis for effective evaluation of outcomes and productive science-policy.

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John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934), makes a distinction between “things experienced ” and “having an experience” in a nuanced way. We can go through multiple processes, experience new things and learn in the process, but this does not necessarily constitute an experience. Given either external or internal dynamics, we can start doing something and then stop. In contrast to such things experienced, one becomes having an experience as the materials of experience run its course and reach the end. The materials of an experience go through multiple connected events while progressing towards its own completion. I encountered Dewey’s thinking on ‘experience’ at the time I was contemplating over the patterns in my coping mechanisms for going-ons in academic life. I realized I had gone through multiple experiences in Turkey’s academic landscape as an STS scholar, but did not necessarily have an experience: I was not able to concurrently build embodied presence of my thinking. There were mostly multiple experiments and obstacles experienced. In this workshop, I will share the materials of my experience as an STS scholar in Turkey in the last seven years, their connections, and the moment of feeling a completion. I will actively invite workshop participants to share their stories of settling/unsettling as an academic in these times of fragmentation, and creatively reflect on the things experienced and their experiments while living in paradoxes. These stories will be constituting departure points to collectively imagine potential futures of academia/STS through the association of ideas.

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University history is a narrative of progress. Former President of Cornell University, Frank Rhode, has expressed this eloquently: “From modest beginnings over nine hundred years ago, it [the university] has become the quiet but decisive catalyst in modern society, the factor essential to its effective functioning and well-being”. Vision statements and strategy plans of universities reflect promissory discourses about achievements. In their branding efforts, universities are optimistic. However, this optimism disappears when university leadership discusses future developments. Then, the promissory discourse is replaced by a discourse emphasising external threats and challenges, above all expectations of austerity. This paper investigates the basis of this pessimism to identify what we call machineries of pessimism. It is based on an analysis of minutes of the Board of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology when the Board discusses budgets and long-term plans, supplemented by articles from the university’s newspaper.