Science

For the societies of Central and Eastern Europe, the century since the Balkan Wars has been a time of profound ruptures. The contributors to this volume examine how academic communities lived through different transitions, such as the collapse of empires, the two World Wars, the Yugoslav and the post-Soviet wars. How did academic institutions relate to informal or underground social movements? What is the place of refugee scholars in the current moment of Russian expansionism? As they rethink the history of Europe’s universities, the authors offer a new understanding of how knowledge communities have shaped, and been shaped by, upheaval, bridging the gap between histories of knowledge and new political histories of the region.

Intercultural, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research interfaces confront researchers with considerable challenges. Towards Shared Research portrays how scholars from different disciplinary and geographical origins and at various academic career stages strive for a more inclusive and better understanding of knowledge about African environments.
The book is addressed to researchers, facilitators, and policy-makers to make a case for participatory and integrative approaches resulting in systemic and co-created analyses.

Restrictions on academic freedom, persecution and armed conflict have forced many scholars into exile. So far, the professional trajectories of these scholars and their contributions to knowledge exchange have not been studied comprehensively. The contributors to this volume address the situations and networks of scholars in exile, the challenges they face in their host countries and the opportunities they use. These issues are highly relevant to discussions about the moral economies of higher education institutions and support programs. Although the contributions largely focus on Germany as a host country, they also offer telling examples of forced mobility in the Global South, including both contemporary and historical perspectives.

What does plausibility mean in relation to scenario planning and how do users of scenarios assess it? Despite the concept's ubiquity, its epistemological and empirical foundations remain unexplored in previous research.
Ricarda Schmidt-Scheele offers an interdisciplinary perspective: she presents approaches from philosophy of sciences, cognitive psychology, narrative theory and linguistics, and tests key hypotheses in an experimental study. A conceptual map lays out indicators for scenario plausibility and explains how assessments vary across scenario methods. This helps researchers and practitioners to better understand the implications of their methodological choices in scenario development.

When the German chemist Emil Fischer presented his lock-and-key hypothesis in 1899, his analogy to describe the molecular relationship between enzymes and substrates quickly gained vast influence and provided future generations of scientists with a tool to investigate the relation between chemical structure and biological specificity.
Rebecca Mertens explains the appeal of the lock-and-key analogy by its role in model building and in the construction of long-term, cross-generational research programs. She argues that a crucial feature of these research programs, namely ascertaining the continuity of core ideas and concepts, is provided by a certain way of analogy-based modelling.

New knowledge, created in international cooperation, is essential for global sustainability. Set against this background, this study focuses on German science policy for research cooperation with developing countries and emerging economies in sustainability research. Based on interviews with policy makers and researchers, the book scrutinizes the actors, processes and contents of science policy in Germany. The author argues that science policy mainly aims at German economic benefits and technology development. This, however, negatively influences global sustainability. To counter existing path dependencies, the author provides recommendations for sustainability-oriented scientific practice and science policy.

Internationalization of the social sciences rests on the setup of international scientific infrastructures, networks, and research agendas. Yet it has also stimulated discussions on academic dependency and the need for the indigenization of theories and methods. This book traces phenomena that accompany the internationalization of social sciences in different parts of the world. Contributions from East Asia, India, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, South Africa, and Latin America offer manifold perspectives on the pathways and desiderata of internationalization and make this volume an important basis for future debates.

Understanding the significance of genetic factors for our lives requires an analysis that goes beyond biological aspects. It is especially necessary to take into account how human beings relate to others and to themselves. Who we are is a result of social action and the ways in which human beings constitute themselves as subjects. Seen from this perspective, genetic medicine is a social practice that shapes how we think about us, how we conduct our behaviour and how we care for our children.
This book scrutinises practices by which individuals become knowledgeable about their genes and constitute them as responsible decision makers.

This first comprehensive study of Norwegian humanities education employs systems theory to analyze its transformation from a form of teacher training to its modern status as research-oriented generalist education.
Using historical documents and statistical analyses, Vidar Grøtta shows that the expansion of the post-war research system in Norway led to an increase in admissions to humanities education in the 1960s and an ensuing research drift in humanities curricula. Interacting with certain political dynamics and the knowledge economy that has emerged since the 1970s, this research drift resulted in a shift in humanists' career patterns and a transformation of the societal functions of the humanities.
The most recent developments in Norwegian humanities education, from 2000 to 2018, are outlined and discussed in the afterword to this volume.