Higher Seminar: "What is Quality in the Humanities?"
Welcome to the presentation of doctoral student Klara Müller's dissertation-PM. Klara is a PhD candidate in the project Making Universities Matter: A Knowledge Platform on the Role of Universities in Society since January 2021. She has a background in the History of Science and Ideas and Media History, with degrees from Uppsala University and Lund University. The working title of the project is “What is Quality in the Humanities? A History of Quality-Making in the Swedish Humanities 1980 – 2020”.
Time: Mon 2021-09-27 13.15 - 14.45
Location: Zoom, email higher-seminar@kth for link
Language: English
Participating: Klara Müller, doctoral student, Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment
This zoom seminar is open for everyone who register. Please send an email to higher-seminar@kth.se if you would like to attend.
Abstract
Science is the systematic pursuit of knowledge. The system is upheld through mechanisms such as quality evaluation. For a long time, quality evaluation in the humanities was primarily a question among the initiated academics within the disciplinary cultures. This changed in the 1980s when a strive for quality through increased efficiency was transmitted from the private sector into the public sector. The external articulation of quality was accompanied by various tools of New Public Management, the use of which was facilitated by the development of computer-aided metric instruments of evaluation. How did the externally formulated perceptions of quality affect the internal, disciplinary, perceptions of quality in the humanities? Drawing on the field of valuation studies, I argue that practices of valuation should be understood as a complex net of social and technical orderings that involve several actors as well as instruments where quality becomes the result. Thus, quality is understood as something that changes over time; quality is made. How and why perceptions of quality change depend on how actors and instruments act to make their quality perception matter. The object of study is the quality-making practices in arenas where conflicts of quality articulations of the humanities have taken place, in Sweden 1980 – 2020.
Presenter
