Scientific Reputation revisited: a cross-disciplinary Comparison of Academic Travel and Conference Interaction (CAT)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Simone Rödder
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511915629

Academic Travel (AT) is an emerging topic of scholarly interest at the nexus of Science and Technology Studies, Higher Education Studies, Mobilities Studies, Interactionist Sociology, the Sociology of Sustainability and Critical Conference Studies. The project sets a Sociology of Science focus to study the relevance of professional travel in science for scientific reputation and individual academic careers. Academics as “cosmopolitans” draw on social ties and maintain a reference group orientation based on their profession, not institutional membership. This rationale for collaboration, conference interaction and travel provides the context for analysing AT’s current role and recent developments. We define AT as travel by academics for research presentation and discussion, networking, academic services and professional development. Hitherto, the focus of theorising and investigating the reward system in science has been on published output and on the natural sciences. This project, in contrast, aims to explore how individual reputation builds up and how academic authority is claimed, engaged, negotiated, granted and maybe lost in conference interaction. We argue that empirical studies of these phenomena need to take into account highly diverse disciplinary travel cultures and propose to compare three fields (Climate Science, Contemporary History and Computer Science), selected for their affinity to two context factors that we deem particular relevant for the study of AT, namely climate-related and digital transformations of short-term (aero)mobility. Firstly, aeromobility is the dominant mode of transportation; Academic Air Travel is the paramount reason for recent interest in the subject and a critical stance towards aeromobility is an important driver of this interest. Secondly, information and communication technologies for virtual interaction are more and more commonplace in academia. Nonetheless, virtually every scientist attended conferences and physical travel was hardly called into question as a matter of principle in science before the COVID-19 pandemic brought AT to an abrupt hold in 2019. We thus propose that COVID-19 acted as a catalyst (project acronym: CAT) potentially representing a critical juncture for the role and relevance of AT, and that it is pertinent and timely to explore this juncture across disciplinary travel cultures. The project will: (1) theorise the relevance of conferences and co-presence and empirically explore AT in different disciplinary cultures, (2) study how conference interaction unfolds with a reputation theory lens and how the (in)ability to travel affects academic careers, and (3) contribute to the sociological understanding of persistence, change and transformation of climate-impacting practices like international travel as part of trans-regional chains of collaboration in science. The project’s interpretative methodology combines a focus group, problem-centred interviews and conference ethnography.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Stefan Cihan Aykut; Professorin Dr. Katharina Manderscheid