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STS Austria - General Assembly/Generalversammlung & Public Lecture by Michael Guggenheim Impact Performances: Bad Auto-Ethnographies of How All Science Is Politics by Other Means Michael Guggenheim (Goldsmiths, London)
Abstract: This talk will analyse a curious case of how STS has had some unintended consequences in research policy. It has been one of the mainstays of STS since the 1990s to argue in various ways that science is politics by other means, that the distinction between applied and basic research does not hold, or with a historic slant, that research is moving in a direction of transdisciplinary research, where users and policy relevance are always part and parcel of research. The recent Research Excellence Framework in the UK has brought these ideas in a curious volte face of history into a normative framework for assessing research. The precursors of the REF had restricted themselves to judge publications. The REF for the first time judged “impact” of each department. To do so, each department had to submit so-called impact case studies. I will analyze the logic of these case studies and conclude that they constitute a case of turning the logic of STS into a normative logic of judging research, but one based on bad auto-ethnography. |