In this project I focus on the study of production, use and translation of social science knowledge on its travels between science and society. I aim at understanding the differences between knowledge regimes in areas of natural and technical research on one side and social sciences on the other, and in the status and role of social science research in the “knowledge society”. I draw on science and technology studies (STS) theoretically and conceptually, mainly on approaches following from the actor-network theory. The studies inquire into the collective and distributed processes of knowledge production and use, and mechanisms of its stabilization and destabilization, and singularization and attribution. My research will be based on an extensive study of literature, secondary analyses of my previous research and an original qualitative research (study of documents, individual and group discussions, and study of media discourse). The core of the research will be two case studies of knowledge production and use 1. concerning the “Roma issue”; 2. in the thematic area of “sustainable development”.
Project publications (total 9, displaying 1 - 9)
The chapter deals with the moral and political economy of science while using the concept of "modes of ordering" developed by John Law. On the basis of an ethnographic research in a social scientific academic institution it discusses modes of ordering as they are deployed in the current transforming Czech science and analyses power strategies enacted through specific definition of the modes and shifting between them.
This book is about different forms of societal impact of the social sciences. It presents a polemic with a narrow understanding of societal impact of research as practiced by science policy in the Czech Republic (and elsewhere). Three basic theses are proposed and argued. 1. Social sciences’ operation in society is multiple and more significant than usually assumed in public and policy debate, and by the academic community.
Technology has become a key vehicle and index of the societal impact of science. Technology’s dominant image, both in science and technology studies (STS) and in science policies, is one of a material device or a complex procedure using machines with origins in natural science disciplines. This article inquires into the vehicles and forms of societal impact in the case of the social sciences.
Science policies and science studies largely share an understanding of scientific knowledge and objects as immutable mobiles. This article shows how the analysis of research assessment in a non-Anglophone country and its effects on social sciences can shed new light on this shared notion.
Recently there have been pleas for STS to make a difference in how science policies are constructed and enacted. Much less remarked upon is the possibility that there may be troubling alignments between science studies and research policies in the form of shared conceptual, epistemological and methodological assumptions. Both have come to emphasise material outputsand visible activity, obscuring other processes, relationships and orderings involved in science work.
I argue in this chapter that we do not need, in STS, to be concerned with losing theory (to descriptions and stories, fieldwork, practice or politics), rather recognizing different forms in which theory is and can be practiced. Along that line, we create a space to further decenter STS theory from masculinity, professional community and the (lab) natural science epistemic order.
Being slightly polemical with consensualist thrust of the opening article and inspired by Roland Barthes and Carl Schmitt, they outline two moments of politicization. In the first moment, up to now self-evident and given realities are doubted, only to initiate, in the second moment, a dispute that is undecidable rationally and entails the recognition of legitimate enemies. At the close, a typology of various forms of depoliticization is proposed.
Review of a book Good Girls Look the Other Way. Feminism and Pornography by Kateřina Lišková.
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