Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Science - Higher Education Research

Research

Some of my research has been disciplined by projectification. Below are current and past research projects.

 

Postdoc careers

How are postdocs socialized? How do they become competitive? This project, which I lead together with Kathia Serrano Velarde (University of Heidelberg), analyzes the socializing effects of different types of academic competition on postdocs. The study is designed to capture intrapersonal development in time through a qualitative panel design. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation and part of the Research Group Multiple Competition in the Higher Education System.

 

Risky research

What is risky about risky research? This project investigates different notions of risk that are mobilized in funding programs dedicated to risky research. The project addresses this question by studying the German Research Foundation's Reinhart Koselleck Funding Program, which is specifically dedicated to exceptionally innovative, higher-risk projects. Funded by the DFG, the project aims to investigate empirically how research is evaluated and discursively labeled as "risky" across different disciplines and epistemic cultures.

 

Professorial hiring

How are professors appointed? This project was concerned with the procedural organization of professorial recruitment. It examined how candidates present themselves in applications, how they are are assessed and compared, and how recruitment decisions are legitimized. The project was based on archived records of appointment procedures that took place at German universities. The project was funded by the German Research Foundation (2015-2018).

 

Evaluative documents

How do documents enable evaluation? Different genres of academic documents do not only document what and who is deemed valuable, but also facilitate and structure processes of evaluation in the first place. My research proceeding from these assumptions has been concerned with academic obituaries and how they consecrate lifetime achievements, and with the evolution of academic curricula vitae in a longitudinal perspective (the latter with Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Leiden University).