Eurograd message

Message posted on 29/01/2025

CfA 4S 2025 Panel: Universities as Nodes of Knowledge Reverberations

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. EASST's Eurograd mailing list -- eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net Archive: https://lists.easst.net/hyperkitty/list/eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net/ Edit your delivery settings there using Account dropdown, Mailman settings. Website: https://easst.net/easst_eurograd/ Meet us on Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@easst Or X: https://twitter.com/STSeasst

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