Abstract
In recent decades we have witnessed a growing interest in the ongoing re-ordering of science-society relations in political decision-making and in the production and circulation of knowledge. In my contribution to this edited volume I focus on calls to promote transdisciplinary research methods as one of the more recent attempts to re-think science-society relations by presenting a case study of an Austrian research funding programme called proVISION. This programme has funded research projects in the area of sustainability research, which were explicitly required to apply transdisciplinary research methods in order to move toward a “new science culture” of “responsible care”. This contribution carves out the programme’s vision of re-ordering science-society relations and of re-distributing responsibility. Building on that it will focus on concrete practices of producing and circulating anticipatory knowledge in transdisciplinary collaborations and ask how the programme’s vision becomes “translated” by researchers in their projects. In doing so the chapter explores how the envisioned re-distribution of responsibility is enacted through concrete research practices situated within particular institutionalized cultures of knowledge production and circulation.
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Notes
- 1.
The materials on which the analysis is based were gathered in the project “Transdisciplinarity as Culture and Practice. Analyzing Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research Projects in the Programme proVISION”, led by Ulrike Felt at the University of Vienna. Accessed March 13, 2018: https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/research/completed-research-projects/transdisciplinarity-as-culture-and-practice/
- 2.
These notions have been described and discussed extensively, therefore I will in my discussion focus on only the aspects or themes that are of importance to the analysis presented in this chapter. For a valuable overview and discussion of these debates see for example (Hessels and Lente 2008).
- 3.
- 4.
Rome Declaration. Accessed March 13, 2018: https://ec.europa.eu/research/swafs/pdf/rome_declaration_RRI_final_21_November.pdf
- 5.
It’s important to note here that also another strand of debate plays an important role in current debates about responsibility, namely work on the governance of technoscience and on methods and concepts of technology assessment. Different variations of technology assessment or research concerned with the ethical, legal, and social implications of technoscience are probed in order to find ways of dealing with the responsibilities of science toward society in more or less participatory ways (Barben et al. 2007; Guston and Sarewitz 2002; Rip and Kulve 2008).
- 6.
Rommetveit et al. (2015): http://www.epinet.no/sites/all/themes/epinet_bootstrap/documents/wp1_cross_cutting_report.pdf. Accessed March 13, 2018.
- 7.
“Praxispartner” is a term that was used in the programme documents and by the researchers to refer to non-academic partners that were supposed to be part of the project through the requirement to work in transdisciplinary collaborations. I will elaborate on this notion later in the empirical part of this contribution.
- 8.
ProVISION website. Accessed August 8, 2012: http://www.provision-research.at/
- 9.
The ministry has been re-structured and is now called Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research. Federal Ministry website. Accessed March 13, 2018: https://www.bmbwf.gv.at/english/home/
- 10.
These numbers were presented at an event called “Das 3hoch3 der Nachhaltigkeit” by a representative of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy in May 2011.
- 11.
FORNE website. Accessed March 13, 2018: http://www.forne.at/
- 12.
“Technologies for Sustainable Development” website. Accessed March 13, 2018: http://www.nachhaltigwirtschaften.at/english/index.html
- 13.
As mentioned above, data gathering and (partially) data analysis was carried out in a collaborative research project together with my colleagues Judith Igelsböck, Andrea Schikowitz, and Ulrike Felt. Although this paper is not written collectively, working together on this project still influences my writing about issues of transdisciplinary knowledge production. Thus when I use terms like “we” in the empirical parts of this chap. I acknowledge the contribution of my colleagues. Any mistakes are, of course, my own.
- 14.
This imaginary is visible in the discourse of proVISION policy documents and related documents. However, such discursive spaces are not the only place to look for imaginaries. They can also be observed in material practices and institutional arrangements. I have traced the development of this imaginary elsewhere (Völker 2017).
- 15.
ProVISION Website. Accessed August 8, 2013: http://www.provision-research.at
- 16.
This understanding resonates with the so called “grand challenges of our time” laid out in the Lund Declaration and also in designated parts of Horizon 2020, the so-called “societal challenges” of the European Commission’s research and innovation programme.
- 17.
One of the projects funded by proVISION developed a “naturalness-index”, which sought to map Austria in terms of human interference with otherwise pristine landscapes.
- 18.
- 19.
ProVISION Website. Accessed August 8, 2013: http://www.provision-research.at
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
The interviews for this study were conducted in German. The quotes throughout this section of the empirical part of this contribution are translations by the author.
- 22.
While I touch on broader issues here, it is important to keep in mind that the funding scheme and the research projects that provide the empirical basis of this analysis present a case in which transdisciplinarity is closely entwined with sustainability research in Austria. It is a worthwhile task for future research to comparatively explore how transdisciplinarity might be enacted differently in other areas of research (Brouwer et al. 2017; Després et al. 2004).
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Völker, T. (2021). Re-distributing Responsibility in Transdisciplinary Knowledge Production and Circulation. In: Delicado, A., Crettaz Von Roten, F., Prpić, K. (eds) Communicating Science and Technology in Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52885-0_3
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