Book
Development of Teaching Academics in the Academic Labor Market in Germany
Understanding Knowledge Creation: Intellectuals in Academia, the Public Sphere and the Arts brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and cultures and involves them into a multi-dimensional dialogue on the mechanisms of knowledge creation in the present-day society with a specific focus on intellectuals as knowledge creators in three main arenas of their activity: the ‘institutionalized’ arena - academia - and two adjacent arenas: the public sphere and the arts.
To what extent does science in authoritarian societies initiate practices of democracy and freedom? This article provides an overview of the issue of academic rights and freedoms as an integral part of the academic ethos in the USSR and the Russian Federation and concludes that there has been a paradoxical shift in the relative extent of rights and freedoms in wider society vs. the academic world. In this author’s opinion, academic proto-freedom existed in the USSR as a component of the privileged position held by a segment of the academic community and that, therefore, the latter experienced a degree of freedom that was greater than that afforded by Soviet society in general. The situation evened out in the late 80's and early 90's and finally, with the attack of authoritarianism against the remaining academic autonomy of Russian universities in the 2000s, resulted in fewer freedoms within academia compared to society as a whole.
The paper concerns two principal types of adaptation to “international discussion” by peripheral academic communities in the humanities and social sciences. It claims that all peripheral scholars face a choice between either listening to the most visible figures in their respective international disciplinary communities or communicating with those who are likely to reciprocate their attention. Each of the two choices offer conflicting guidelines for the construction of professional “attention spaces”, and both break in certain ways with the norms of academic communication. Authors use examples from their ethnographic studies of Russian sociology.
Die Wissenschaft in Russland ist von Paradoxien geprägt. Obwohl sich
das Putin-System scharf vom Westen, seinen Werten und Verfahren abgrenzt,
steuert die Regierung Lehre und Forschung an Universitäten und
Instituten zunehmend nach neoliberalen Prinzipien und Standards, die
vom Westen übernommen werden. Marktlogik dominiert. Russlands Führung
will die Internationalisierung der Universitäten vorantreiben und die
Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der russländischen Forschung erhöhen. Gleichzeitig
versucht der autoritäre Staat, die internationalen Kontakte der Wissenschaftler
zu kontrollieren. Mehrere Wissenschaftler wurden nach fragwürdigen
Verfahren als Spione inhaftiert, andere als „ausländische Agenten“
stigmatisiert. Die Freiheit der Wissenschaften ist sowohl von den neoliberalen
Praktiken wie auch von der autoritären Herrschaft bedroht.