Scientific Reputation Revisited: Academic Travel and Conference Interaction
The presentation of self in academic life
Conferences are a central feature of academic life. However, the scientific conference faces new challenges, such as the trend toward digitization in science, the COVID-19 pandemic, and criticism of the climate impact of air travel. Yet conferences are still held in person. Why do academics still travel to professional conferences when virtual alternatives seem so much more convenient, and when air travel has lost some of its former support in both academia and society? The project "Scientific Reputation Revisited: Academic Travel and Conference Interaction" takes a sociological perspective on science, focusing on scientific reputation to examine the role that conferences play in the presentation of self in academic life. We ask: What role and relevance do academics at different stages of their careers and in different disciplinary cultures attribute to academic travel? and How is reputation mediated in conference interactions, both face-to-face and virtual academic meetings, and in formal and informal conference settings?
To this end, we examine three academic fields chosen for their distinct disciplinary cultures regarding the status of conferences and the relevance of academic travel, namely climate science, computer science, and contemporary history. The project examines academic conferences in these fields in Germany using three methodological approaches:
- Individual interviews with junior and senior academics
- Focus group interviews with members of an External Advisory Board composed of high-level researchers from the fields under study,
- On-site ethnographic observation at conferences of professional societies in the fields under study.
The project will theoretically and empirically investigate the relevance of conferences and co-presence, how interaction at conferences unfolds from the perspective of reputation theory, and how the (im)possibility to travel affects academic careers, and it will contribute to the sociological understanding of the persistence, change, and transformation of climate-impacting practices such as international travel as part of transregional chains of collaboration in science.
Project funding
Project funding
The Project "Scientific Reputation revisited: a cross-disciplinary Comparison of Academic Travel and Conference Interaction between Climatisation, digital Transformation and COVID-19 (CAT)" is supported by a Research Grant from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under the Project Number 511915629 and runs from 2023 to 2026.

Team
Team
Principal Investigator: Prof. Dr. Simone Rödder
Co-Investigators: Prof. Dr. Stefan C. Aykut, Prof. Dr. Katharina Manderscheid
Research Associates: Max Braun, Youssef Ibrahim
External Advisory Board
Prof. Dr. Johanna Baehr (Universität Hamburg, Climate Science), Prof. Dr. Gerd Stumme (Universität Kassel, Computer Science), Prof. Dr. Reinhild Kreis (Universität Siegen, Contemporary History)