Minerva最新文献

{"title":"The Therapeutic University","authors":"Joseph C. Hermanowicz","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09539-x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09539-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Universities are generally understood as organizations that extend knowledge based on codified bodies of work developed from systematic research and scholarship. This article examines the emergence of an organizational form that increasingly competes in contemporary higher education: the therapeutic university. A recent phenomenon, the therapeutic university is predicated on emotion in which the goal is to make the experience as a student as comfortable as possible. The article discusses organizational morphology of the therapeutic university by identifying practices within it. The practices establish a contest between a rational-universalistic orientation of the university on the one hand and an emotion-particularistic orientation on the other. The article provides an explanation for why this organizational form arose and what it purports to accomplish. Its operations are ensnared by major paradox: as its identity implies, the therapeutic university postures to do good, but its practices, it is argued, debilitate students and higher learning. The mandate that the broader society gives to higher education is thereby susceptible to lost confidence. The article concludes by discussing a way in which universities may be inoculated from the conditions that support their present-day therapeutic proclivities.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"53 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141570447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Could I Write Like Carol Weiss?","authors":"Øyunn Syrstad Høydal","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09534-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09534-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Academic papers in the social sciences were once more essayistic in their form. The carefree launching of concepts and ideas of academic value were the order of the day, all without the security of the present standardized paper format inspired by the natural sciences. This text draws on the most cited paper by the acclaimed scholar Carol Weiss, as an outset to discussing academic writing; why we write as we do and what we may lose by doing so. This means exploring the history of academic writing as well as discussing the complex, yet exciting, relationship between writing, identity, language, and the very process of conducting research.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"73 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141503648","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Persistence of Gender Inequality in e-Science: The Case of eSec","authors":"Öznur Karakaş","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09530-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09530-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 <i>organizational level</i> 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 <i>a structural-level</i> obstacle which leads to especially female junior faculty leaving academy for industry. An <i>individual level</i> obstacle is observed alongside these as disavowal (<i>Verleugnung</i>) of gender disparities, an affect identified as a key mechanism of subjectivation in neoliberalism.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141194702","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Effects of Governance to Causes of Epistemic Change","authors":"Jochen Gläser","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09526-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09526-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141170221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What is the Space for “Place” in Social Studies of Astronomy?","authors":"Raquel Velho, Michael Gastrow, Caroline Mason, Marina Ulguim, Yoliswa Sikhosana","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09527-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09527-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"24 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141153872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Uneasy Peace: How STEM Progressive, Traditionalist, and Bridging Faculty Understand Campus Conflicts over Diversity, Anti-Racism, and Free Expression","authors":"Steven Brint, Megan Webb, Benjamin Fields","doi":"10.1007/s11024-023-09517-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09517-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"211 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140636248","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Making Science Relevant: Comparing Two Science Advisory Organizations Beyond the Linear Knowledge Model","authors":"Göran Sundqvist, Sebastian Linke","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09528-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09528-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article compares two science advisory organizations: the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), with a special focus on how their respective policy systems absorb the knowledge delivered for use in decision processes. The science-policy processes of these two organizations differ in important respects; ICES delivers highly specified knowledge to a specified uptake mechanism, while the IPCC produces unspecified knowledge for an unspecified uptake mechanism. Since both environmental governance areas are criticized for lack of needed action, a comparison is of interest asking how this might relate to the organization of science advice. As theoretical resources for this explorative comparison we utilize two approaches from the field of science and technology studies: the co-production approach, which focuses on the entanglements of scientific and political processes, and the systems-theory-oriented multiple-worlds model, which assumes a clear difference in institutional logics between the scientific and the political field. Since the IPCC has been critically analysed by several studies utilizing resources from the two approaches, we contribute with new insights by bringing in ICES, which is a much less studied organization exposing a different science-policy structure. One important finding is that the two theoretical approaches focus on different aspects, exposing ‘links’ and ‘integration’, both of which we argue are important for analysing and assessing science advisory organizations. Moreover, these aspects can be advantageously integrated into a single theoretical framework.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140609129","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Political Speech on Campus: Shifting the Emphasis from “if” to “how”","authors":"Mario Clemens, Christian Hochmuth","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09525-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09525-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Universities in many liberal democracies, such as the US, the UK, or Germany, grapple with a pivotal question: how much room should be given to controversial utterances? On the one side, there are those who advocate for limiting permissible speech on campus to create a safe environment for a diverse student body and counter the mainstreaming of extremist views, particularly by right-wing populists. On the other side, concerns arise about stifling the free exchange of ideas and creating an atmosphere of fear and censorship. The debate is further complicated by participants’ occasional uncertainties about the legal norms relevant in the given context, such as when freedom of speech is an issue and when it is not. This paper addresses the question of whether universities should allow actors with primarily political (as opposed to scholarly) agendas to speak on campus. Focusing on German universities, we begin by discussing some of the potentially relevant legal norms. We then propose shifting emphasis from <i>whether</i> we should make room for public political discussions on campus to <i>how</i> such events must be organized so that they deliver the goods that their advocates emphasize while avoiding the dangers of which critics warn. Drawing on conflict management literature concerned with process design, we make several practical suggestions on how to organize an event that brings political discourse to the university campus without causing harm.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140100167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Citation Elites in Polytheistic and Umbrella Disciplines: Patterns of Stratification and Concentration in Danish and British Science","authors":"Alexander Kladakis, Philippe Mongeon, Carter W. Bloch","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09521-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09521-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The notion of science as a stratified system is clearly manifested in the markedly uneven distribution of productivity, rewards, resources, and recognition. Although previous studies have shown that institutional environments for conducting research differ significantly between national science systems, disciplines, and subfields, it remains to be shown whether any systematic variations and patterns in inequalities exist among researchers in different national and domain specific settings. This study investigates the positioning of citation elites as opposed to ‘ordinary’ researchers by way of examining three dimensions of concentration (accumulation of publications and citations, specialisation, and institutional concentration) in biology, economics and physics in Denmark and the UK. Across all three dimensions, we put Richard Whitley’s bipartite theory to the test, suggesting a nexus between the intellectual structure of a discipline and the configuration of its elite. The study draws on a dataset of researchers who published most of their publications in either physics, biology, or economics over the 1980–2018 period and with at least one publication in 2017–2018 while affiliated to either a British or a Danish university. We find higher degrees of concentration in the UK compared to Denmark, and that physics and biology respectively display the greatest and lowest degree of concentration. Similar patterns in disciplinary differences are observed in both countries, suggesting that concentration patterns are largely rooted in disciplinary cultures and merely amplified by the national context.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139955231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evaluation Practices of Doctoral Examination Committees: Boundary-Work Under Pressure","authors":"Maja Elmgren, Åsa Lindberg-Sand, Anders Sonesson","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09523-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09523-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The doctorate forms the basis for academic careers and the regeneration of academia, and has increasingly become important for other sectors of society. The latter is reflected in efforts on institutional, national as well as supranational levels to change and adapt the doctoral degree to new expectations. As doctoral education is embedded in research, changes in governance and funding of research further affect the doctorate. The evaluation of the doctoral thesis appears, however, to have remained true to the academic tradition: an examination committee exercising their gatekeeping in a ceremonial setting. This study sets out to explore doctoral examination committees’ evaluation practices. Insights were gained through six focus group interviews with experienced examination committee members at three large research-intensive universities in Sweden. Of particular interest is how the object of evaluation is formed, the nature of the boundary-work conducted, and variations in examination practices related to different and changing conditions for research and doctoral education. Our results show how the object of evaluation emerges through a gradual interpretation of the thesis and defence, becoming more complex and nuanced as the process of evaluation progresses from its initial stages to the final closed discussions of the committee. The finalised object of evaluation, only fully present at the conclusion of the closed meeting and hence transient in nature, encompasses the research contribution, educational achievement, and academic competence of the candidate. Furthermore, the boundary-work conducted in this process often transcends the object of evaluation to include also supervision and the local context for doctoral education and research, and hence contributes to upholding, and potential changing, norms in research fields, educational contexts, and academia at large. This extended boundary-work intensified as problems and inconsistencies were discovered during the evaluation process. The ceremonial staging underscored the gravity of the decision and the extended boundary-work. Despite changing conditions for the doctorate, our findings highlight the importance of the practice of evaluation committees, and the disciplinary communities to which they belong, for upholding and negotiating norms in academia.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139955102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}