Scientific reputation revisited: a cross-disciplinary comparison of academic travelProject by Simone Rödder funded by DFG

3 December 2022, by CSS

Photo: Frank Vessia on unsplash

CSS member Simone Rödder has successfully applied for a DFG (German Research Foundation) grant on the topic "Scientific Reputation revisited: a cross-disciplinary Comparison of Academic Travel and Conference Interaction between Climatisation, digital Transformation and COVID-19 (CAT)".

The project chooses a sociological approach to investigate the significance of professional travel in science for reputation and careers. We aim to address the question of whether COVID-19 acted as a catalyst representing a critical turning point for the role and relevance of academic travel. The project will:

(1) theorise the relevance of conferences and co-presence and empirically explore academic travel in three different subject cultures,

(2) investigate how the (im)possibility to travel affects academic careers, and

(3) contribute to the sociological understanding of the persistence, change and transformation of climate-impacting practices such as international travel as part of transregional scientific collaboration.

Three disciplinary cultures (climate science, contemporary history and computer science) are compared, chosen for their affinity with two contextual factors that we consider relevant to the study of academic travel, namely climate-related and digital transformations of short-term (air)travel. The interpretative methodology of the project combines a focus group, problem-centred interviews and conference ethnography.

The project was developed in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Stefan Aykut and Prof. Dr. Katharina Manderscheid in the CSS Working Group "Academic Travel". The project is funded for three years and will start in spring 2023.