Sarah Davies (Part 1) on mobility, precarity and notions of excellence

Changing Academic Life

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Overall her work explores how science and society are co-produced, with the digital and digitisation being key aspects. Of particular interest is her current research on the conditions of academic work and knowledge production.

In Part 1 here, we discuss her experiences with academic mobility, touching on issues of cultural differences, precarity, and reflecting on who is able to be mobile or not and with what consequences. This leads to discussions about how we interpret CVs, and she challenges us to re-think internationalization, projectification of research, and notions of excellence. Part 2 is out now too.

“Research always unfolds…also …finding things that I thought were interesting, or people that I wanted to work with, and that was driving some of the choices I made around this mobility.”

[Projectification]: “the shift to a project logic, where you have to design a piece of research that fits into a certain timeframe… it is actually a totally different logic to older imaginations of scholarship … something that unfolded over many years. It was not oriented to packages of funding”

Overview (times approximate) [Transcript coming soon]:

0:05 Welcome to Changing Academic Life & episode introduction

02:58 Sarah introduces her background and her many geographical and disciplinary moves

08:30 The passive voice removing the messiness of the lab

11:02 Move from science communication to science and technology studies

16:30 The red threads through her work

19:00 Coping with the uncertainty of shorter term contracts

23:00 The cultural challenges of the different academic contexts

33:15 Re-thinking how we imagine internationalization and mobility to explore other ways of creating networks

37:38 How we interpret CVs to recognize diverse situations

40:56 Notions of excellence and projectification, re-thinking new funding models and more long-term positions

51:47 End

Related links:

Sarah’s web page

Example ‘Projectification’ references:

• Felt, Ulrike. 2017. ‘Under the Shadow of Time: Where Indicators and Academic Values Meet’. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 3 (February): 53. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2017.109.
• Ylijoki, Oili-Helena. 2014. ‘Conquered by Project Time? Conflicting Temporalities in University Research’. In Universities in the Flux of Time, 108–21. Routledge.

Stuart Reeves’ podcast conversation

CC BY-SA 4.0 by Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Sarah Davies

Thanks to Jana Herwig and Mario Seidl from the Vienna University Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Video production suite for use of their podcast recording facilities.

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
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