Preliminary Programme

The paper analyzes how Nordic social science alcohol researchers discussed ways to understand male metropolitan youths and their alcohol consumption in the long 1960s. This was a period when questions about youth culture as well as the role of alcohol in modern society were the subject of intense public debate in many countries. At the same time, it was also a period when comparative methods had a broad impact on social science research. In 1959, the Nordic Council’s newly instigated Nordic Committee for Alcohol Research initiated a joint Nordic project to investigate and compare male youths’ drinking habits in metropolitan neighbourhoods in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Making empirical use of the Nordic Committee for Alcohol Research publications, the paper discusses how a gendered Nordic specialist discourse on youth alcohol use was established, circulated, and reconfigured during the long 1960s. (Show less)

Recently, much focus has been upon the commercialization of university research within science and engineering through the licensing of intellectual property or the creation of start-up companies. However, it has been argued that a narrow focus on these mechanisms is not justified from a historical perspective, as it fails to capture many of the ways that university research has impacted society at large. Furthermore, the concept of academic engagement with industry has been recently introduced in the literature on university-industry interactions to stress the importance and the variety of knowledge networks between university and industry—visible through mechanisms such as co-authorship, consultancy, university-industry centers and more—and as a contrast to commercialization of research in the narrow sense of intellectual property and start-up companies.
In this paper we explore academic engagement from a historical perspective focusing on the creation and maintaining of knowledge networks between specific academic and non-academic organizations over several decades. Therefore, drawing on an empirical study of collaborative projects in biomedical engineering we examine the challenges of creating and maintaining knowledge networks between Chalmers University of Technology and the Sahlgrenska University Hopspital, both in Gothenburg, Sweden, over seven decades, between 1948 and 2018.
In our historical analysis, which is based on semi-structured interviews, archival data, bibliographic data, and Ph.D. theses, we apply two broad lenses. First, we look at academic engagement through the lens of collaborative research projects, seeing them as being central for the establishment and configuration of knowledge networks between academic and non-academic organizations. Second, we use the lens of organizational routines—defined as patterns of interdependent actions carried out by multiple actors—applied in collaborative research projects as representations of the configuration of the knowledge network between the actors involved. Furthermore, we pay a particular attention to tensions between the ostensive part of a collaborative research routine— an abstract idea of how it is possible, given a specific situation, to reach a desired situation by performing the action prescribed by the routine— and the performative part of the same routine, which is the implementation of the abstract idea in a given context. These tensions we interpret as challenges in initiating and maintaining the knowledge networks among the involved actors.
We find that the first half of the period can be characterized by the building up and maintenance of extensive knowledge network between the two organizations, mainly through collaborative Ph.D. projects where Ph.D. students are paired, one from engineering and one from medicine. However, during the second half of the period there are increasing difficulties in maintaining the knowledge networks already established. These difficulties can be interpreted as recurrent challenges in pairing and integrating knowledge within engineering and medicine when confronted with a series of institutional, technological, organizational, and generational changes. (Show less)

The making of ritual objects including vegetal elements requires the observance of specific rules. The most interesting phenomenon is the way in which traditional knowledge is enriched, and not deprived, by the progress of science. The paper analyses the case of the citron, etrog.
Jewish traditional knowledge does not fall into the category of lost or forgotten knowledge. The very notion of traditional knowledge can be questioned with regard to Jewish culture, insofar as what is considered "tradition" is the product of an intellectual elite. In the field of what might be called ecology, that of environmental control, Jewish traditional knowledge is instrumental especially in the ritual field. The making of ritual objects including vegetal elements, such as the bouquet of the four species and the Sukkot hut, requires the observance of a certain number of rules, such as identifying each of the four species, ensuring that its freshness is maintained throughout the festival, etc. The most interesting phenomenon to study with regard to this traditional knowledge is the way in which it is enriched, and not deprived, by the progress of science. In my paper I will present the case of the citron, etrog, in terms of how contemporary biological research is helping the practice of ritual. The etrog is the species that, among the four that must compose the ritual bouquet, raises the most questions about its production and preservation. The work of the researcher Eliezer E. Goldschmidt, a specialist in plant genetics, will be used as a starting point for an anthropology of Jewish knowledge at the crossroads of the past and the present. (Show less)