Sarah Davies (Part 2) on luck, disrupting excellence, and cultures of care

Changing Academic Life

Sarah Davies is a Professor of Technosciences, Materiality, & Digital Cultures at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University of Vienna. Overall her work explores how science and society are co-produced, with the digital and digitisation being key aspects. Of particular interest for our discussions is her current research on the conditions of academic work and knowledge production.

In Part 2, Sarah Davies shares from both her research and lived experiences on topics like equity and valuing diverse work, care work in academia and who does that work, creating collegial research cultures, and about luck - the trigger for why I wanted to talk to Sarah. She discusses a recent paper she and co-authors published on luck and the situations of research, and how accounting for luck might just be one way of disrupting problematic rhetorics of excellence. This is a continuation of Part 1 of our conversation where she talked about her own career path, touching on issues of mobility, precarity and projectification of research notions of excellence.

“Care for people is very integrated with care for their science…You [can’t] separate the epistemic production, the knowledge production, from caring for people”

“It throws into contrast, this narrative of the heroic, excellent individual researcher, and the complex contexts in which good research is done.”

“You can't do science alone, you can't be this isolated person, you actually need quite some social skills”

“When we talk about excellence, that is somehow really seen as not including luck […] It's important to take luck seriously.”

Overview (times approximate) [Transcript coming soon]:

00:29 Episode introduction

03:26 Sarah’s inaugural lecture

06:06 Negotiating contemporary academia, related equity issues & how we can see and value diverse work

08:17 Acknowledging care work and who does that work

11:09 Increasing interest in statements on research cultures

12:38 Having explicit discussions about how we engage together

17:19 The way people speak about luck in academic trajectories & the disruption of the excellence rhetoric

22:15 Toxic behaviors and the care work it requires

25:14 Taking luck seriously & her won experiences of luck

30:00 The importance of people and social skills

31:55 Sarah’s experiences in setting up her own group and learning through doing

37:05 End

Related links:

Sarah’s Inaugural lecture

• Text: https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:1622120
• Video: https://vimeo.com/780321785/0ef9327e6b

Papers:

Davies, Sarah R., and Maja Horst. 2015. ‘Crafting the Group: Care in Research Management’. Social Studies of Science 45 (3): 371–93.

On ‘research culture' (56 min) - Wellcome seems to be taking the lead here:

Davies, S. R., & Pham, B.-C. (2023). Luck and the ‘situations’ of research. Social Studies of Science, 53(2), 287–299.

Davies, S.R. & B-C Pham, Why don't we account for luck in research careers? LSE Blog, 18 April 2023.

Liboiron, Max, Justine Ammendolia, Katharine Winsor, Alex Zahara, Hillary Bradshaw, Jessica Melvin, Charles Mather, et al. 2017. ‘Equity in Author Order: A Feminist Laboratory’s Approach’. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3 (2): 1–17.

Loveday, Vik. 2017. ‘“Luck, Chance, and Happenstance? Perceptions of Success and Failure amongst Fixed-Term Academic Staff in UK Higher Education”: Luck, Chance, and Happenstance?’ The British Journal of Sociology, September.

Lund, Rebecca W. B. 2015. Doing the Ideal Academic - Gender, Excellence and Changing Academia. Aalto University.

Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Glasgow CAL podcast conversation: ‘Tanita Casci and Elizabeth Adams on supporting, rewarding and celebrating a positive collegial research culture’

Sarah’s collaborators/team members

• Ariadne Avkıran
• Esther Dessewffy
• Fredy Mora Gámez
• Bao-Chau Pham
• Andrea Schikowitz
• Kathleen Gregory
• Nora Ederer
• Elaine Goldberg

CC BY-SA 4.0 by Geraldine Fitzpatrick and Sarah Davies

Thanks to Jana Herwig and Mario Seidl from the Vienna University Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) Video production suite for use of their podcast recording facilities.