4-7 September 2019: Call for abstracts to a CHANGE-session at the annual meeting of the 4S (SOCIETY FOR SOCIAL STUDIES OF SCIENCE) in New Orleans, USA

Change team members Jennifer Dahmen-Adkings and Anita Thaler invite you to send open panel paper submissions in the form of abstracts up up to 250 words for their session "Disrupting from the Inside: Towards a Research System Change" ( Sessions Nr. 38). Jennifer Dahmen-Adkins and Anita Thaler invite you to send open panel paper submissions in the form of abstracts of up to 250 words for their session "Disrupting from the Inside: Towards a Research System Change" (session nr. 38).

Deadline February 1st, 2019.

For decades the European Union has policies in place and funding offered to foster gender equality in academia and research. The notion has turned from ‘fixing women' to ‘fixing the institutions' while at the same time new paradigms like ‘Responsible Research and Innovation' (RRI), which see gender equality as integral part of research processes and contents, are proclaimed and advocated by the European Commission. But these policy-driven and requested change processes face inner-institutional as well as societal resistance (e.g. right political movement). Holistic systemic approaches are necessary to disrupt and interrupt traditional organizational structures towards social gender just work environments. The stronger institutionalisation of gender studies for instance in US American universities supported structural changes within the organisations, and makes gender equality efforts on the other hand more difficult in the majority of European institutions where gender studies are not structurally present and thus not acknowledged as research field. And while many European research performing organisations are still lacking gender programmes and gender equality offices, the feminist STS community discusses for decades the necessity to reflect on intersectional, LGBTQI* and postcolonial perspectives, which should be included in structural change policies as well.

In this open panel we want to stimulate cross-cultural knowledge exchange and try to foster the dialogue on intersectional perspectives on structural change in science and research organisations. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers, which contribute towards a better understanding on how structural and institutional conditions of precarious employment affect personal careers in multiple ways.

We are interested in papers on the macro-level of science policy and performance evaluation, on the meso-level of university governance and organisational effects (like ‘advanced discrimination'), and on the micro-level of individual careers and psychological factors (like ‘embodied anxiety'). Beside social justice, gender, and intersectional analyses, we especially encourage queer-feminist approaches and LGBTQ* perspectives. We would like to stimulate a discussion of papers, who dare to develop the vision of a fair, inclusive and just academic environment — how can disruptions from the inside work towards a system change in research and higher education?

For further information please visit:  https://www.4s2019.org/call-for-submissions/