Research
Some current and past projects are listed below.
Postdoc careers
How are postdocs socialised? How do they become competitive? This project, which I am leading together with Kathia Serrano Velarde (University of Heidelberg), analyses the socialising effects of different types of competition on postdocs. Intrapersonal developments and socialisation processes are recorded within the framework of a qualitative panel design. The project is part of the DFG research group ‘Multiple Competition in the Higher Education System’.
Risky research
What exactly is risky about risky research? This project reconstructs various concepts of risk that are mobilised in funding lines for risky research. The use case for this is the DFG's Reinhart Koselleck Programme, which is explicitly dedicated to particularly innovative and risky research. The aim of the DFG-funded project is to empirically investigate how research in various disciplines is labelled and evaluated as ‘risky’.
Appointment procedure
How are professors recruited? This project was concerned with the procedural organisation of appointment procedures. The focus was on the question of how candidates present themselves in applications, how they are evaluated and compared and how appointment decisions are legitimised. The 2015-2018 DFG-funded project was based on files from appointment procedures that took place at German universities.
Documents and evaluations
How do documents enable evaluations? Different genres of documents do not simply document who and what is valuable in science. Documents enable and structure evaluation processes in a fundamental way. My research based on this assumption was concerned with academic obituaries and the consecration of life achievements that takes place in them, as well as with the evolution of academic curricula vitae in a longitudinal perspective (the latter with Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Leiden University).