The post-lunch session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen that I’ve chosen is on the digital society, and begins with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and a paper on actionable research. Universities are under great political and financial pressure around the world at the moment, and this has led to an increased emphasis on knowledge transfer, open science, and public engagement for scholarly work, but such emphases are not well-aligned with internal reward structures in academia at this stage.
While society is understood to be deeply in need of our expertise, this enshrines a pattern where knowledge is produced within academia and transferred to society; this ignores and undermines more collaborative, embedded, and immersed approaches which can generate much more comprehensive insights, however, and are also able to intervene more authentically and effectively in current issues.
Immersed research can gain more privileged access to organisations and data; it connects to embedded knowledges within the community. A project with De Groene Amsterdammer, for instance, was able to examine how this magazine is exploring the role of AI within journalism, benefitting from the overlap between journalism and research; similarly, embedded work within the Dutch Ministry for Social Affairs and Labour was able to observe the policy formation and implementation process first-hand.
Out of this also comes the Data Ethics Decision Aid tool, which implements a dialogue process for evaluating data projects and value-sensitive design; another is the Fundamental Rights and Algorithms Impact Assessment approach which was co-created with the government sector.
These also generate more opportunities for stakeholder engagement within stakeholders’ own environments, especially also around policy-making, and for continuing professional education at the executive level (for instance in media industries and public management). This also involves novel and unusual teaching formats suited to such groups: fireside talks, data walks, excursions, and other approaches).
Such engagement requires extensive team work; it cannot just be delegated to the most junior staff to deliver; it produces non-traditional research and teaching outputs too; and further application involves new solutions and products. University administrations need to understand that such work needs to be embedded into evaluation and funding frameworks, incentivised by structural and financial support, and supported by training and infrastructure for inclusive research ecosystems.
