Paper short abstract:

Based on social media ethnography, the paper focuses on the experienced and narrated responsibilities of researchers in neoliberal university. Twitter posts about the relation between scientific impact and the responsibility of a researcher are analysed in the context of affective practices.

Paper long abstract:

In the Finnish Universities Act (2009), the mission of the universities is defined ‘to promote independent research - -, to provide research-based higher education and to educate students to serve their country and humanity at large’. In the current neoliberal university (e.g. Olsen & Peters 2005), these sublime responsibilities have often become numbers of productivity: numbers of publications, of study credits, of degrees, of external funding etc. These numbers are important in aiming to cost-effective universities in which the societal justification for research comes from its impact. What is considered as impact can vary between disciplines and financers, however.

In my paper, I will discuss the relation between the ways we understand scientific impact and the responsibility of an individual researcher. Doing ethnographic social media analysis and following Finnish Twitter, I analyse the ways the responsibilities of research organisations are visible in the work of an individual academic in the context of neoliberal university: what is the responsibility of a researcher comprised of, and how is it narrated and felt?

The ideas and experiences of researcher’s responsibility narrated in Twitter are analysed in the context of affective practices (Wetherell 2012), focusing on the ways they make researchers attached to or distanced from academia. The case study is based on Finnish material but reflects the global changes within academia.

The paper is part of the Academic Affects project in which we focus on research strategies as affective economy.