Minerva最新文献

E-science, or networked, collaborative and multidisciplinary scientific research on a shared e-infrastructure using computational tools, methods and applications, has also brought about new networked organizational forms in the transition of higher education towards the entrepreneurial academy. While the under-representation of women in ICTs is well-recorded, it is also known that the potential of new organizational forms such as networked structures to promote gender equality remains ambiguous, as they tend to perpetuate already existing inequalities due to their embeddedness in larger and longer-term structural or institutional gender effects. Based on a year-long ethnographic study in a networked academic e-science collaboration in Sweden and 45 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with its affiliated researchers, this article analyzes the multi-level obstacles to achieving gender equality in e-science to highlight the ways in which gendered disparities persist in this new, project-based academic networked organization in Sweden, hereafter called eSec. At the organizational level eSec remains deeply embedded in the traditional disciplinary and institutional academic setting, inadvertently reproducing existing gender imbalances across sciences. Furthermore, as a project-based organization, it is also embedded in the shift towards an entrepreneurial university model driven by new managerialism, the latter having a well-documented adverse effect in gender equality. This represents a structural-level obstacle which leads to especially female junior faculty leaving academy for industry. An individual level obstacle is observed alongside these as disavowal (Verleugnung) of gender disparities, an affect identified as a key mechanism of subjectivation in neoliberalism.

In this paper I argue that the attempts by science studies to identify epistemic effects of new governance instruments have largely failed. I suggest two main reasons for this failure. The first reason is that neither quantitative nor qualitative studies of effects of governance instruments meet the respective methodological standards for establishing causality. While much of this could be repaired, the second reason is more severe: given the complex causal web between governance and knowledge production and the multi-level nature of causation, a strategy that starts from a particular governance instrument and tries to identify its effects cannot work. I propose to reverse this strategy by starting from the observation of epistemic change and applying a strategy of “causal reconstruction” (Mayntz), which identifies the causes of this epistemic change and among them the contribution by governance. This approach has the advantage of starting from well-identified change. Challenges posed by the new approach include the empirical identification of epistemic change and the need to integrate sociological methods in science policy studies.

All large-scale telescope facilities are constructed within a geographical, social, historical, and political context that includes nested layers at the global, national, and local levels. However, discussions about the geographic siting of astronomy facilities, for example, the communities in which they are embedded or the interactions between the facility and its locale, are uncommon in social science studies of astronomy, and no extant review focused on this gap in the literature. In this literature review and discourse analysis, we explore the ways in which research about astronomy facilities and their local communities has emerged, and the extent to which it focuses on the Global South. We find that literature addressing the social and policy aspects of astronomy facilities has an emphasis on the Global North. However, literature addressing host communities has an emphasis on the Global South. Broadly, the discourses related to host communities in the Global South have emerged from reflections on the controversies related to large-scale telescopes in Hawai’i, Chile, and South Africa. One common theme linking these discourses is that a focus on benefits at the national and international levels obscures a range of problematic power dynamics and outcomes at the local level. The notion of the Global South as an ‘empty space’ in which astronomical observation does not constitute impactful action amongst local communities, is challenged by discourses that centre local contexts, and challenged by discourses that employ conceptual frameworks with a focus on revealing power dynamics.

In recent years an uneasy peace has descended in U.S. academe between those who feel research universities have done too little to advance the representation of minority groups and women and those who feel that the administrative policies developed to improve representation can and sometimes do come into conflict with core intellectual commitments of universities. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews with 47 natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics faculty members at a U.S. research university, the paper examines the background characteristics of three sets of protagonists - academic progressives, academic traditionalists, and those whose views bridge the divide - and the way respondents discussed and justified their viewpoints. The paper draws on the theory of strategic action fields to illuminate the structure and dynamics of the conflict and suggests modifications to the theory that would improve its explanatory power for this case.