Lisa Sigl

University of Vienna | UniWien · Research Platform Responsible Research and Innovation in Academic Practice

Within the last two decades, research has increasingly been called upon to respond to societal issues and tackle global challenges (e.g., global health, climate change, food security). While such demands are not fundamentally novel and research funding has long been conditioned by expectations of practical applications, contemporary transformations...

Soil microbial ecology is a relatively young research field that became established around the middle of the 20th century and has grown considerably since then. We analyze two epistemic re-orientations in the field, asking how possibilities for creating do-able problems within current conditions of research governance and researchers' collective se...

This paper traces how the self-understanding of soil science has changed in relation to ideas of societal relevance and academic legitimacy. While soil science was established as an academic discipline with strong links to agriculture, this link was largely lost around 1980. This led to a perceived crisis of the discipline, which has been followed...

Science is about venturing into the unknown to find unexpected insights and establish new knowledge. Increasingly, academic institutions and funding agencies such as the European Research Council (ERC) explicitly encourage and support scientists to foster risky and hopefully ground-breaking research. Such incentives are important and have been grea...

In this text we introduce a card-based engagement method we call “IMAGINE Responsible Robotics”. The basic purpose of this method is to facilitate reflection and exchange about societally relevant issues in research, development and design (RDD) of robotic technologies, particularly also in increasingly inter- and transdisciplinary contexts of robo...

Building on group discussions and interviews with life science researchers in Austria, this paper analyses the narratives that researchers use in describing what they feel responsible for, with a particular focus on how they perceive the societal responsibilities of their research. Our analysis shows that the core narratives used by the life scient...

Knowledge producers are ascribed a key role for societal development today, as they produce a key resource for knowledge-based societies. Even as the institutional, social, and cultural environments of research change (c.f. “evaluation society,” “academic capitalism”), we know surprisingly little about how this results in different research practic...

In this article, we aim to explore the agency of scientific entrepreneurs and research managers in shaping their Triple Helix contexts. Drawing on institutional documents and in-depth interviews with research managers and scientists in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the study shows that trust in scientific entrepreneurs from research m...

The ways in which societies and institutions institutionalize and practice invention management reflects not only how new ideas are valued, but also imaginaries about the role of science and technology for societal development. Often taking the US Bayh-Dole-Act as a model, many European states have recently implemented changes in how inventions at...

The institutional contexts of research increasingly require researchers to anticipate their productivity and the uncertainties inherent in their research. This applies to both academic researchers and to researchers in start-up companies. This creates a specific kind of uncertainty, anticipatory uncertainty, that we define as the state of being unc...

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has become a new buzzword in science policy, pointing to a shift in the role of research plays in contemporary societies. While on a discursive level responsibility is easily welcomed, to implement RRI in research practice seems challenging. RRI comes at a time when other forces, such as a call for fast inn...

In the past years European economic and employment policies increasingly underline the strategically important role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in boosting Europe’s innovation potential through supplying highly skilled labour [1]. Two key priorities are particularly emphasized: The first is to embed entrepreneurship into higher educatio...

Gliederung: Problemaufriss & Fragestellung. - Studie und Methoden. - Die Erfahrung existenzieller Unsicherheit. - Der Umgang mit Unsicherheiten. - Wie der Umgang mit Unsicherheiten Forschungskulturen verändern kann. - Schlussbemerkung.

The experience of uncertainties in exploring the unknown—and dealing with them—is a key characteristic of what it means to be a life science researcher, but we have only started to understand how this characteristic shapes cultures of knowledge production, particularly in times when other—more social—uncertainties enter the field. Although the lab...

In the past years European economic and employment policies increasingly underline the strategically important role of higher education institutions (HEIs) in boosting Europe’s innovation potential through supplying highly skilled labour. Two key priorities are particularly emphasized: The first is to embed entrepreneurship into higher education cu...

The paper focuses on STI internationalization policy-making as an arena in which STI policy and foreign policy have increasingly started to interact over the past decade. It asks if and how STI internationalization has led to a new policy field in the making and how STI stakeholders assess the interrelation between STI policy and international rela...