[EASST-Eurograd] 4s26 open panel on University Struggles

[Sharon Traweek via Eurograd]

Fyi: The 50th anniversary meeting of the international, interdisciplinary Society for Social Studies of Science, will be held 7-10 Oct 2026

in hybrid format, virtually and in Toronto, Canada. The theme for 4s26 is TechnoPower * Technoscientific Futures.

30 April is the deadline for submitting proposals for presentations at the meeting. Among the over 250 Open Panels for 4s26 is

#48 University Struggles: Navigating Public Expectations, Political Management, and AI

organized by Vivian Lagesen, Kyriaki Papageorgiou, and Knut Sørensen, all of NTNU, plus Sharon Traweek, UCLA

 

Many universities are now facing profound challenges. These complexly interacting forces include:

· budget cuts and Increased use of new metrics to allocate resources;

· claims that AI will transform teaching, scholarship, and university governance;

· political interventions targeting teaching and research, perhaps reducing academic freedom; and

· distrust in the benefits of higher education and the trustworthiness of research.

 

Some universities assume their established modes of engagement are sufficient to address these new conditions. Others see the current situation as fundamentally new; some respond with optimism and some with deferral, while others invoke new strategies, designed by a few.

 

STS scholars have important tools at our disposal to analyze these dynamics and to critically examine how universities attempt to manage, negotiate, and reimagine their roles under these pressures: science and technology studies, public engagements with technosciences, science policy analyses, and situating knowledge making in powerful pollical economies, to name just a few. Furthermore, our experiences establishing STS as a field in academia could be invoked in how universities manage the introduction of new scholarly fields. Expanding STS university studies is an important STS contribution.

 

We welcome papers that address those issues and concerns, including for example, why, how, and to what effect do:

· universities respond to public skepticism, including efforts at transparency, public dissemination, and outreach;

· the different parts of universities engage differently with these forces;

· university strategies maintain and redefine academic freedom from political intervention;

· universities use specific techniques and technologies to align with or resist government policies;

· universities frame and govern AI in relation to teaching, research and academic labor; and

· prior experiences of establishing new fields in academia, such as STS, tell us about contemporary university transformations; plus

· past and future university utopias and imaginaries inform the current polycrisis.