(Online) Talks

Thursday, April 26, 14.15-16.00, online

Virginie Servant-Miklos, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Pedagogies of Collapse

Environmental collapse is upon us, yet the education system carries on much as it did in the 20th century: under the promise of eternal growth, preparing students for a future that looks much like the past. Progressive pedagogies of the 20th century like problem-oriented project work and problem-based learning have been “rationalised" to fine-tune students’ employability under a market-driven, neoliberal educational governance model that pre-supposes and requires stable environmental conditions and infinite natural resources to function. Re-examining the existential roots of critical pedagogy in light of the climate crisis calls educators to reconnect with learning as revolution. In the urgency of the present, learning built on imperfect solidarities and reckoning with trauma may guide our students’ generation back to a safe operating space for humanity.

To read more about how the speaker is working with the environmental crisis in her own pedagogy, please see her recent open-access article:

"Environmental education and socio-ecological resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons from educational action research", Environmental Education Research 28, 1 (2022), 18-39.

To sign up to the event, please write to erua@ruc.dk

Monday, April 4, 14.15-16.00, online

Marigo Raftopoulos,Tampere University

The Future of Learning and Innovation: How AI is Changing the Game

From beating world grandmasters in games of Chess and Go to solving vexing scientific problems, artificial intelligence is disrupting our traditional models of learning, creating and working. However, despite the astonishing rate of progress with AI technology, our social and economic challenges cannot be solved by machines alone and require innovative forms of human-machine collaboration and co-creation. The project objectives of Augmented-Humans are aimed towards improving engaging interactions and problem solving between human and machine that generate data, facilitate problem solving, and aid both human and machine learning.

To sign up to the event, please write to erua@ruc.dk

Thursday, December 9, 17.00-19.00 (CET), online

Yves Citton, University of Paris 8

Practicing the Presence of Study against the Future of the Universities?

The notion of “black study”, sketched by Stefano Harney & Fred Moten in The Undercommons, offers a welcome alternative to the current conception of our universities, driven by the toxic double imperative of “teaching” and “research”. What does it mean to “practice study”? Is it bound to be a clandestine activity, or can it be promoted by academic administrations? What insights can be drawn from recent proposals about a “third university”, different from the “first university” (which delivers MBAs) as well as from the “second university” (which delivers certifications of guilty conscience through critical humanities)? 

Selected readings from Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, Elie Meyerhoff, la paperson and Graham D. Burnett will guide us in addressing such questions. We will begin with the last words of a piece entitled “The University: Last Words”: “Fuck the future of the university. Please stop worrying about that shit so we can worry (till, tease, turn over, chew over, chop up and fret) the practice of our presence. No promises from the university, no demands on the university, just the presence of our practice in love and battle, in and through its ruins, on the other side of its dying gasps and last words.”

This session is organized by Yves Citton, University of Paris 8 in cooperation with Anne Kwaschik’s history of knowledge research seminar, University of Konstanz.   

You can download some of the suggested article here:

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, « The University : Last Words », Academia.com, 2020

Elie Meyerhoff, introduction à Beyond Education. Radical Studying for Another World, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Yves Citton, « Practicing Study as Self-Alienation and Counter-Addiction (studium, black study, études) » to be published in Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education, Special Issue “Answering the Question: What is Studying?”, 2022

The event will take place online. If you want to participate, please write an e-mail to erua@ruc.dk and we will mail you a zoom link as well as additional reading material. 

Thursday, October 28, 17.00-19.00 (CET), online

Steven Shapin, Harvard University / Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Roskilde University

Where Are the Sciences Today?

The sciences are everywhere in the world today. They influence our taste, behavior, and preferences. They determine how our children are taught in school and what food we eat at restaurants. An important reason for this is the increasing number of students around the world. Around half of a generation is now entering tertiary education. There are simply more scientists and scientifically trained people around us. This situation has also changed what we consider as science and which sciences are being prioritized. In recent decades, more emphasis has been put on fields such as life and biomedical sciences, information technology, business administration and, not least, the human sciences. In our first survey of the ERUA universities, it was apparent that these fields are also particularly strong in the educational profile of Europe’s reform universities. Therefore, the research group “Re-imagining higher education” (WP 2) invited Steven Shapin, Harvard University, to discuss his work on the modern science and especially his short article, “Invisible Science,” which discusses these developments.

This session is chaired by Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Roskilde University in cooperation with Anne Kwaschik’s history of knowledge research seminar, University of Konstanz.   

You can download the article here:

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/shapin/files/invisible_science_final.pdf

The event will take place online. If you want to participate, please write an e-mail to erua@ruc.dk and we will mail you a zoom link. 

Wednesday, September 22, 14.15-16.15 (CET), at Roskilde University (on campus)

Anne Kwaschik, University of Konstanz

Laboratories of the Social: Socialism and Social Science in the 19th century

The talk explores the shared genealogy of socialism and the social sciences in the 19th century. It argues that Charles Fourier’s early socialist thoughts present an organisational alternative to state socialism that was fully realized in cooperativism at the end of the 19th century. Using concepts taken from the laboratory studies, it investigates cooperative practices as forms of ‘applied social science’ thus questioning the nexus between theory and praxis. It suggests a historical understanding of the social sciences as laboratory practices.

The session is based on a precirculated research paper and chaired by Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, Roskilde University in cooperation with the Science Studies Seminar, University of Roskilde.

The event will take place on campus. We will be in 43.1-37 (building 43, ground floor, room 37). You can find the map of Roskilde University here: https://ruc.dk/en/directions-roskilde-university. If you want to participate, please write an e-mail to erua@ruc.dk.

The second talk is about European research funding and the Europeanisation of social science research. Kristoffer Kropp and his team at Roskilde University will present their ongoing research project investigating the issue. For additional information about Kropp and the project, see here.

14. April 2021, 14:15-16:00 Uhr

Kristoffer Kropp, Roskilde University

A field of European Social Science?

In this talk we will present the current project analyzing the possible formation of a field of European social sciences. We hence investigate the possible formation of a relatively integrated social scape of European social science, integrated through both intellectual and institutional structures. The social sciences have historically been closely connected to the nation states. In the last decades we have witnessed an increasing Europeanisation of many aspects of social life and among them the sciences. The question is how this has shaped both the internal structures and practices of social science knowledge production, but also the relation between social science and political institutions on a European level. In the presentation we will present the overall theoretical framework for understanding the processes of forming a field of European social science and first preliminary analysis form the project. Here we will focus on the changes – both cognitive and organization – in the EU research funding for the social sciences as well as on the political struggles and negotiations over the position and purpose of the social sciences in EU research policies and the practices of navigating social science research projects on a European level.

The first talk is about the emergence of the modern research university. Ku-ming (Kevin) Chang will present his recent comparative project, tracing the global history of research education.

3. März 2021, 14:15-16:00 Uhr

Ku-ming Chang, Academia Sinica

The History of Research Education: A Global Overview, 1840-1950

This lecture surveys research education across the globe in ca. 1840-1950. It begins by defining the research education that I study. It then discusses major “apparatuses” of research education, such as the seminar, the laboratory, and fieldwork. Thereafter it analyzes research education into five different modes: formal education, informal education, apprenticeship, self-training, and study abroad. It is followed by a deliberation on the relationship between training methods and disciplinary identities, by a survey of research education for women, and then by an examination of the roles that nationalism and imperialism played in foreign countries and colonies. It concludes by delineating what may be called the first globalization of research education in history.

30. September 2020, 14:15-16:00 Uhr

Prof. Dr. Anne Kwaschik, Universität Konstanz

“La Colonisation est une Science qui ne s’improvise pas”:  The Scientisation of Colonialism in the Age of Empire

At the turn of the 19^th century, new and integrated perspectives on cultures and societies as a whole emerged. Social and colonial reform projects demanding socio-economic data and innovative modes of their use drove this development forward. Based on her recent research, Anne Kwaschik explores key moments and practices of this process that she suggests framing as scientisation of colonialism. (Kwaschik 2018; 2020) Taking the short history of “colonial sciences” as a starting point, she intends to show how European colonial communities contributed to the establishment of the colonial as object of science and administrative regulation. The talk investigates the formation of “scientisation” as a cultural code through international practices and institutions highlighting in the second part questionnaires as a vital tool of scientisation. On a broader scale, she aims at discussing the scientisation of colonialism as boundary work.