Dear colleagues,
Were inviting abstracts to our 4S 2025 panel (#91) entitled Universities as
Nodes of Knowledge Reverberations. The deadline is January 31 and you can
submit your abstract here:
https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php.
Panel convenors:
Kyriaki Papageorgiou, Knut H. Srensen , Vivian A. Lagesen (NTNU), Sharon
Traweek (UCLA)
Panel abstract:
Paradoxically, universities are under threat just as demands for the making
and circulating of knowledge have intensified in societies around the world.
Some doubt that higher education is useful, relevant, or appropriate. Others
question whether universities can provide ethical, applicable, and timely
research or pedagogy. After four decades of rankings and cost-benefit analyses
of their management, productivity, and quality, many wonder if university
research and higher education have been or can be properly governed or
assessed. Some are critical of universities as public sites where increasingly
strong debates are held about the past, present, and future of many kinds of
knowledge-making, circulating, and using in society. Both freedom of speech
and academic freedom are challenged.
That context sets a compelling stage for reevaluating the position and purpose
of academia within knowledge-making ecologies around the world. At the heart
of STS are questions of how knowledge and society resonate, including patterns
across many variations in time and place, plus how those processes are
adjudicated. Studying universities as always contested ecologies for using,
making, and circulating different kinds of knowledge and knowledge makers is
especially relevant for STS, both as a field of study and reflexively as a
community of scholars. At this critical juncture, the importance of such STS
research is both unmistakable and under threat.
This panels presentations will explore universities as key nodes within these
dynamic knowledge landscapes, where academic work is not merely pursued and
transmitted but also demanded, criticized, transformed and amplified. We are
interested in papers that investigate the complex practices of research and
teaching in higher education worldwide, examining how those practices
permeate academic institutions and extend into broader societal domains in
ways that are both subtle and transformative. The discussion will focus on the
challenges and opportunities facing universities, now and in the future.
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