Ruth Müller’s research while affiliated with Technische Universität München and other places

In this contribution we explore the recent reforms and transformations of Austrian universities as processes that are in many ways shaped by explicit and implicit normative assumptions about the past, present and futures of universities in national and international contexts. We argue that a reflexive engagement with the prospective and retrospective technopolitical imaginaries is essential for a better understanding of the current tensions in (a) the gover-nance of now-autonomous universities, (b) contemporary experiences of working and living in academia, and (c) the relationship between science and society. Our analysis of these influential imaginaries aims to develop an analytical basis for reflexively re-imagining and re-legitimizing Austrian universities taking into account both their national specificities and the importance of an international orientation.

There is a crisis of valuation practices in the current academic life sciences, triggered by unsustainable growth and “hyper-competition.” Quantitative metrics in evaluating researchers are seen as replacing deeper considerations of the quality and novelty of work, as well as substantive care for the societal implications of research. Junior researchers are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions of these issues are much less frequently considered. This paper aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interplay between how research is valued and how young researchers learn to live, work and produce knowledge within academia. We thus analyze how PhD students and postdocs in the Austrian life sciences ascribe worth to people, objects and practices as they talk about their own present and future lives in research. We draw on literature from the field of valuation studies and its interest in how actors refer to different forms of valuation to account for their actions. We explore how young researchers are socialized into different valuation practices in different stages of their growing into science. Introducing the concept of “regimes of valuation” we show that PhD students relate to a wider evaluative repertoire while postdocs base their decisions on one dominant regime of valuing research. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the epistemic and social development of the life sciences, and for other scientific fields.

The practices around genetic testing for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer in one major counselling centre in Austria are at the core of this article. Our study investigates how people undergoing genetic testing try to make sense of this experience that is perceived to be new and uncommon in Austria and that is thus taking place in a setting not validated through public insurance support and is not yet embedded in any greater societal narrative about its merits, perils and overall value. In particular we aim at exploring what genetic testing means on the individual level but also how it relates people to different forms of collectives – ‘genetic families’, ‘hybrid collectives’ and larger ‘biosocialities’. We will follow how as tested persons are transformed into ‘biomedical entities’, novel forms of identities are co-produced. In our analysis thus both entities and identities appear as inherently tentative as people move through the spacio-temporal landscape of biomedicine and society. People's accounts of genetic testing will be shown as deeply entangled with a specifically Austrian technopolitical culture, with broader civic epistemologies prevalent there, but also with diverse other thought-styles of social communities that people are part of. Investigating genetic testing in Austria in such a manner is meant to raise awareness of how much local differences in technopolitical cultures might matter when it comes to the implementation and uptake of a seemingly global biomedical technology.