Bart Penders (Maastricht): Questioning the Collaboration Rulebook

Invitation to the Monday Colloquium Talk at Deutsches Museum

The distribution of credit, resources and opportunities in science is heavily skewed through processes of discrimination and through incentive structures that feed the so-called Matthew Effect. Protesting such injustice in science takes a variety of shapes, including directed scholarship into its causes, processes, practices and consequences. Scientists are practitioners, and since these injustices are hardwired into the rules, guidelines and conventions governing scientific behaviour, one available form of protest is to break those rules. This paper reviews instances of rule-breaking scientists through repurposing the concept of civil disobedience for science in the context of academic authorship. We show that, in contrast to whistleblowing or conscientious objection, civil disobedience targets science’s injustice on a more systemic level. However, as an empirical category in practice, civil disobedience in science engenders uncertainties and disagreements on the local status of rule-breaking and the legitimacy of attributing the label.

When: Monday, May 13, 2019, 4:30 pm

Where: Deutsches Museum, Alter Seminarraum, Bibliotheksbau, Museumsinsel 1

The talk is part of the Monday Colloquium at Deutsches Museum. The lecture series' main theme in the summer semester 2019 will be "Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences". For the full program click here.