175. Recognition and reward in STS and beyond: re-evaluating the endangered ecology of academia.
Tjitske Holtrop, Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Thed van Leeuwen, Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Sarah de Rijcke, Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Alex Rushforth, Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Marta Sienkiewicz, Center for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS);
In the past decade, movements to reform research evaluation have been growing internationally, concerned about misapplications of overly narrow performance criteria, at the expense of other qualities or policy priorities such as open science, team science, diversity and inclusion, societal relevance, mission-oriented and transdisciplinary research or citizen science. These debates have brought to the fore what STS has long understood to be the case: scientific knowledge is a collective achievement of many kinds of actors who engage with one another in academic activities in many different ways and for many different reasons. Yet, our structures and cultures of recognition and reward haven't followed suit, with quantitative performance criteria (such as bibliometrics and grant income) still guiding evaluation and strategic decision making in hiring, career development, and funding.
This panel explores what the struggles and solutions around recognition and reward look like in STS environments and academia at large. What do we understand recognition and reward to mean? What are we and are we not recognizing and/or rewarding, when it comes to academic ambitions, activities, actors, and accomplishments? What concrete shifts in recognition and reward have been and are being proposed in STS and beyond? What kinds of practices, collectives and ideas of science, accountability and value do these make possible? And what kind of methodologies and infrastructures are we building to facilitate making visible what has traditionally been invisible?
We invite empirical examples of, reflections on, and proposals for recognition and reward movements in any academic context.
Keywords: Social Movements and STS, Disciplines and the Social Organization of Science and Technology, Scientometrics, recognition and reward; research evaluation; scientific reform; research intelligence
