WTMC Annual Meeting 2025

Forming political commons after and beyond academia

In our last meeting with the WTMC PhDs, they identified the issue of finding career pathways outside of academia that do not necessarily place them within the confines of global capital interests and the private sector as an important topic.

How can we do what is dear to our hearts, what is politically meaningful in an ever so unhinged world, while also not getting tossed around in the precarity of current employment conditions? What does it mean to form solidarity with others who have similar troubles in mind, and how would that even look? There are no easy and all-encompassing answers, therefore we have identified experts and scholars that have played major roles in the formation, maintenance and sometimes even dissolution of trans-academic commons that were formed out of critical engagements with similar troubles, their stories will help us think as we carve our own pathways.

Speakers:

Dr. Miriam Meissner, Assistant Professor Culture and Political Ecology University of Maastricht, member of Ontgroei (Dutch degrowth network), Scientists for Future

Dr. Sara Strandvad, lead of libraries, citizen service and culture houses Odsherred, previous adjunct chair Arts in Society University of Groningen

Madelon Eelderink, founder Seven Senses foundation, expert Participatory Action Research, PhD candidate Utrecht University

Tamalone van den Eijnden, PhD candidate University of Twente “practice, politics and poetics of commoning”

Dr. Selçuk Balamir, postdoc University of Amsterdam (petrocultural heritage in the just transition), housing commoner (NieuwLand, de Nieuwe Meent), climate organiser (Shell Must Fall, Future Beyond Shell)”.

Authoritarianism and the University

Keynote lecture by Sarah de Lange: Academic freedom and the global rise of the far right

Democratic backsliding across the globe is going hand in hand with a decline in academic freedom. In many countries the far right, when in power, is a major contributor to the erosion of democracy and academic freedom. However, also in countries in which these parties are in opposition, they try to curtail academic freedom. In this presentation, Prof. Dr. Sarah de Lange discusses the ideology of the far right and its relation to higher education and academic freedom, as well as the various strategies that the far right employs to constrain academic freedom with respect to teaching, research, and public outreach.

Sarah de Lange is Professor of Political Pluralism at the University of Amsterdam and is best known for her research on extremism, populism, and radicalism. She studies the way the far right is eroding democracy in Western democracies and together with colleagues from C-REX at the University of Oslo, she has recently launched the European wide research project Harassment, Intimidation, and Threats to Science (HITS).

Commentaries by Daniela Craciun (University of Twente) and Paul Wouters (Leiden University).

Followed by a panel discussion moderated by Esther Turnhout (University of Twente).

What about research fraud?

The extent and nature of scientific skulduggery pose a challenge to the traditional stance of ironic neutrality in science studies. We can write smart accounts about what counts as the same noise in a copied graph, show that what counts as acceptable image enhancement is a matter of convention, or how scientific fraud cases are inflated to moral panics. But what do we have to offer to the scientists who discover outright fraud on a large scale? How do we relate to the people who work in integrity teams that face industrialised scientific fakery?

This session presents experiences from people in research integrity teams and science ‘sleuths’, in discussion with STS scholars who study ‘epistemic corruption’ (Sismondo)  – with some critical distance.

Short presentations and panel discussion with:

Tim Kersjes (Springer Nature research integrity team)

René Aquarius (sleuth, Radboud UMC)

Maud Bernisson (ISiS, RU/LISIS, Paris)

Mady Malheiros (ISiS RU/LISIS, Paris)

Moderator: Willem Halffman (ISIS, RU)