CfP Funding bodies and late modern science
Utrecht University, Cultural History Research Group and Descartes Centre, 30 November – 1 December 2017
In his The Scientific Life. A Late Modern Vocation
Steven Shapin addresses the status of the late modern scientist. On the
one hand, we have an image of modernized and rationalized science:
there is an impersonal,
universal scientific method that has made science an object of planning
as much as any other domain of modern society: “The full expression of
the rule of rule over spontaneity is found in the confidence that the
production of truth can be not just rationally
organized but effectively planned.” (p.10) In this image of science it
is of no importance who the scientist is: s/he is just an executor who
is ‘morally equivalent’. At the same time, however, Shapin shows us that
in late modern technoscience supposedly “premodern
resources” like personal virtue, familiarity, and charisma have become
all the more important in the production and spread of scientific
knowledge and technologies. “Late modernity proliferates uncertainties”,
Shapin argues, “and it is in the quotidian management
of those uncertainties that the personal, the familiar, and the
charismatic flourish.” (p.5).
Whereas Shapin focuses on industrial research –
en passant questioning many of the supposed differences between
science in industry and academia – we want to turn to a defining
institution of academic research that displays similar tensions:
the funding body. In recent years, these agencies have received much criticism, as they would have installed an
audit culture in science: a culture of accountability with
anonymised protocols, standardized application procedures and cycles of
quality control, that are part of the present-day system of competitive
research funding. Funding bodies, in short, seem
illustrative of the organized distrust that would be typical of late modern institutions. Yet, it can easily be argued that
trust remains very much central to the workings of funding
bodies. The judgement of applications, for one, is often a process of
personal interaction. In fact, following Shapin, we might postulate that
in the organization of competitive research funding
in late modernity a supposedly premodern resource like trust has become
all the more important in the distribution of funds and management of
careers.
In this mini-conference we want
to explore the tension between distrust and trust, between the
procedural and personal, in funding modes. Our central questions are how
funding bodies have developed over time; how they
have reconfigured “who truth-speakers are in late modernity” (p.6); and how this has changed (techno)scientific practices over the course of the twentieth century.
Contributions are expected to
take funding bodies as their starting point, but can address many
different aspects of the practice of science: the formation of
disciplines, the development of scientific
personae, the changing role of valorization and societal
relevance of science, changing forms of science policy, the practice of
application and grant-giving, et cetera.
Confirmed speakers are Steve
Fuller (Warwick), Kirsti Niskanen (Stockholm), Laura Stark (Vanderbilt),
Mark Solovey (Toronto), Ludovic Tournès (Geneva), Melinda Baldwin
(Washington). In addition, we welcome submissions
for twenty-minute paper presentations relating to the topics mentioned
above. Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted by 15 June 2017 and
can be send to Pieter Huistra at
p.a.huistra@uu.nl or Noortje Jacobs at
Noortje.jacobs@
The conference will take place at Utrecht University and is co-organized by the
Cultural History Research Group and the
Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science. There will be no conference fee. Lunches and a conference dinner will be offered to all speakers
at no cost. Participants will be responsible, however, for their own accommodation costs.