Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - RMZ

Consortium management: Dr. Sheena Fee Bartscherer

The awareness of the impact that science has on social and technological progress and the uncertainties that it produces is not reserved for political actors alone. Private citizens, industries, and scholars themselves have become increasingly aware of this circumstance and the resulting need to engage in the production and governance of science. Respectively, societal stakeholders use scientific findings to further their political or commercial interests. They finance research or set up think tanks and citizen science projects as participatory ways to streamline scientific knowledge production for applications in public policy and private businesses. Some create consulting services for political decision-makers, producing a ‘private science’ sector that competes with traditional academia to assess the risks that our societies are facing. Citizens protest identified risks stemming from science and technologies, pressuring scientists to respond and address them. Due to the increased participation of societal actors from other domains, some argue that a more democratic form of knowledge is being produced nowadays, while others argue that it has led to a more biased and uncertain science. Simultaneously, scholars have grown increasingly critical of their own domain as well, ranging from individual scholars voicing their concerns over issues in their respective fields to (cross-)disciplinary discourses and coordinated reform initiatives addressing scientific uncertainties from within.

We propose to explore the reflexivity and reflectivity of the communities associated with science reforms. To examine these aspects, the project poses three overarching research questions:

1. What are the argumentative strategies and justifications of proponents and critics when discussing science reforms?

2. What are the social and intellectual structures of communities associated with science reforms, and to what extent does their knowledge production align with research specialties or scientific social movements?

3. How are current science reforms different from previous science reforms?

Joint project with:

Prof. Dr. Jesper Schneider, Aarhus University (Dänemark)

supported by