Abstract
Media have become an important arena of and actor in the co-evolution of science and society. Medialization re-shapes the professional and public identities of scientists, who are increasingly expected to consider communication activities as part of their professional role. Our interest in this contribution lies in tracing how medialization impinges on key processes and symbolic orders within research. The central thesis of this chapter is that medialization does not only affect the context in which research happens, such as its financial organisation or regulation, but that media have become deeply involved in shaping scientists’ epistemic living spaces. Our approach starts from a person-centred perspective, and asks what consequences the proliferation of communication activities and of media representations of research has for academic scientists and their ways of living and working in research. How does scientists’ increasing engagement in communication activities feed back into research and influence their identities and practices as scientists? How do these communication activities affect the social and symbolic orders that define what it means to do research today? And how do they both tacitly govern research environments as well as researchers’ self-understanding? By starting from these questions about how researchers’ ways of living and working in science are affected by medialization on a micro-level we aim to work towards conclusions about the more systemic effects of medialization, both in science as well as in its relation to other societal actors and systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Even though this supposed globality may often turn out to be a circulation in a sphere comprising Europe and North America.
- 2.
Funded by the Austrian ministry of research. http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/research/completed-projects/scienceweek-2001/?L=2.
- 3.
Funded by the Austrian ministry of research, the ministry of traffic, innovation and technology, and the Austrian council for research and technological development. http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/research/completed-projects/scienceweek-2002/?L=2.
- 4.
Funded by the Austrian genome research programme GEN-AU. http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=57585&L=2.
- 5.
Funded by the Austrian genome research programme GEN-AU as an ELSA project. http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=57575&L=2.
- 6.
Funded by the European Commission, FP6. http://www.knowing.soc.cas.cz/.
- 7.
Funded by the Austrian genome research programme GEN-AU as an ELSA project. http://sciencestudies.univie.ac.at/research/living-changes-in-the-life-sciences/?L=2.
- 8.
These two to three hour qualitative interviews were structured by different question blocks in which the life scientists we interviewed talked about their personal professional development, about the epistemic directions of their work and how they have changed over time, and the institutional contexts they have worked in. Toward the end of the interview they were asked to give their impression of a series of key terms and catchwords currently used in academia, such as mobility or excellence. During the interview, the interviewer invited the interlocutor to add a reflexive dimension to his or her narration, either by asking him/her to relate the different blocks of the interview – such as epistemic orientations to institutional framings, and/or by asking him/her to compare his/her story to the stories of others, e.g., to prior generations. The interviewer/interviewee “peer to peer”-relationship differed from most other types of qualitative research, as both conversation partners were conceptualized as different types of experts on the issue at hand, as well as colleagues affected by different issues touched upon in the interview (e.g., the pervasiveness of audit logics), albeit in very different disciplinary contexts. This peer-to-peer relation allowed for building trust and to explore the discussed issues in considerable depth, but it also needed to be reflected in analyzing the interviews, in particular with regard to meanings taken for granted by both interviewer and interviewee.
- 9.
In a related rationale, study programmes in the life sciences at Austrian universities have offered courses and trainings in science communication.
- 10.
Depending on the topical structure of public discussions, making these kinds of arguments can be harder for some fields than for others. See also Section 7.4.1 of this paper. Further our argument resonates with the findings reported by Peters (Chapter 11).
- 11.
See Felt et al. (2010a) for a more detailed discussion of young life scientists’ perceptions of academic careers.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is based on empirical work done in several research projects – for details please see the section on material and methods. The authors acknowledge the contribution of all colleagues involved in these projects, and would like to thank the editors and reviewers of this volume as well as the participants of the yearbook conference in Bielefeld for their comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Martha Kenney for the final language editing.
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Felt, U., Fochler, M. (2012). Re-ordering Epistemic Living Spaces: On the Tacit Governance Effects of the Public Communication of Science. In: Rödder, S., Franzen, M., Weingart, P. (eds) The Sciences’ Media Connection –Public Communication and its Repercussions. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2085-5_7
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