Renting Valuable Assets: Knowledge and Value Production in Academic Science

Domesticating data: Traveling and value-making in the data economy

Data are versatile objects that can travel across contexts. While data's travels have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the sites from where and to which data flow. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in two connected data-intensive laboratories and the concept of domestication, we explore what it takes to bring data 'home' into the laboratory. As data come and dwell in the home, they are made to follow rituals, and as a result, data are reshaped and form ties with the laboratory and its practitioners. We identify four main ways of domesticating data. First, through storytelling about the data's origins, data practitioners draw the boundaries of their laboratory. Second, through standardization, staff transform samples into digital data that can travel well while ruling what data can be let into the home. Third, through formatting, data practitioners become familiar with their data and at the same time imprint the data, thus making them belong to their home. Finally, through cultivation, staff turn data into a resource for knowledge production. Through the lens of domestication, we see the data economy as a collection of homes connected by flows, and it is because data are tamed and attached to homes that they become valuable knowledge tools. Such domestication practices also have broad implications for staff, who in the process of 'homing' data, come to belong to the laboratory. To conclude, we reflect on what these domestication processes-which silence unusual behaviours in the data-mean for the knowledge produced in data-intensive research.

Therapeutic value in the time of digital brainwaves

This article examines the value of medical technology through the case of electroencephalograms (EEGs), devices used to visualize brain activity and diagnose seizures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows that EEGs are valued differently by patients and medical practitioners. While practitioners value EEGs for their clinical utility, i.e., ability to inform clinical decisions, patients value EEGs even in the absence of clinical utility. Indeed, patients derive long-lasting therapeutic effects from this diagnostic technology. These findings intervene in the utilitarian calculus of therapeutic value-a mode of reasoning that equates value with clinical utility-commonly deployed in biomedicine and engineering and call for a recognition of alternative notions such as the therapeutic value of being witnessed and cared for by medical experts via EEGs and other technologies that require time to work. Expansive notions of therapeutic value are imperative for including marginalized patients-especially low-income, disabled, and women patients-in debates on automation and the future of healthcare. Studying how multiple stakeholders value a medical technology provides insight into valuation, objectification, expertise, and other concerns central to science and technology studies.

Assetization and the 'new asset geographies'

An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. Geographers and other social scientists are producing a growing literature illustrating the range of new (and old) asset classes created by capitalists in their search for revenue streams, for which we argue assetization is a necessary concept to focus on the moment of enclosure and rent extraction. It is a pressing task for human geographers to unpack the diverse and contingent 'asset geographies' entailed in this assetization process. As a middle range concept and empirical problematic, we argue that assetization is an important focal point for wider debates in human geography by focusing attention on the moment of enclosure, rent extraction, and material remaking of society which the making of a financial asset implies.

Innovation in Technology Instead of Thinking? Assetization and Its Epistemic Consequences in Academia

This paper draws on the notion of the asset to better understand the role of innovative research technologies in researchers' practices and decisions. Faced with both the need to accumulate academic capital to make a living in academia and with many uncertainties about the future, researchers must find ways to anticipate future academic revenues. We illustrate that innovative research technologies provide a suitable means for doing so: First, because they promise productivity through generating interesting data and hence publications. Second, because they allow a signaling of innovativeness in contexts where research is evaluated, even across disciplinary boundaries. As such, enrolling innovative research technologies as assets allows researchers to bridge partly conflicting valuations of productivity and innovativeness they are confronted with. However, the employment of innovative technologies in anticipation of future academic revenues is not always aligned with what researchers value epistemically. Nevertheless, considerations about potential future academic revenues derived from innovative research technologies sometimes seem to override particular epistemic valuations. Illustrating these dynamics, we show that processes of assetization in academia can have significant epistemic consequences which are important to unpack.

The practical ethics of repurposing health data: how to acknowledge invisible data work and the need for prioritization

Throughout the Global North, policymakers invest in large-scale integration of health-data infrastructures to facilitate the reuse of clinical data for administration, research, and innovation. Debates about the ethical implications of data repurposing have focused extensively on issues of patient autonomy and privacy. We suggest that it is time to scrutinize also how the everyday work of healthcare staff is affected by political ambitions of data reuse for an increasing number of purposes, and how different purposes are prioritized. Our analysis builds on ethnographic studies within the Danish healthcare system, which is internationally known for its high degree of digitalization and well-connected data infrastructures. Although data repurposing ought to be relatively seamless in this context, we demonstrate how it involves costs and trade-offs for those who produce and use health data. Even when IT systems and automation strategies are introduced to enhance efficiency and reduce data work, they can end up generating new forms of data work and fragmentation of clinically relevant information. We identify five types of data work related to the production, completion, validation, sorting, and recontextualization of health data. Each of these requires medical expertise and clinical resources. We propose that the implications for these forms of data work should be considered early in the planning stages of initiatives for large-scale data sharing and reuse, such as the European Health Data Space. We believe that political awareness of clinical costs and trade-offs related to such data work can provide better and more informed decisions about data repurposing.

'Whiteness is an immoral choice': the idea of the University at the intersection of crises

Universities in the global North are shaped against intersecting crises, including those of political economy, environment and, more recently, epidemiology. The lived experiences of these crises have renewed struggles against exploitation, expropriation and extraction, including Black Lives Matter, and for decolonising the University. In and through the University, such struggles are brought into relation with the structures, cultures and practices of power and privilege. These modes of privilege are imminent to the reproduction of whiteness, white fragility and privilege, double and false consciousness, and behavioural code switching. In particular, whiteness has historical and material legitimacy, reinforced through policy and regulation, and in English HE this tends, increasingly, to reframe struggle in relation to culture wars. This article argues that the dominant articulation of the University, conditioned by economic value rather than humane values, has been reinforced and amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic. The argument pivots around the UK Government policy and guidelines, in order to highlight the processes by which intellectual work and the reproduction of higher education institutions connect value production and modes of settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal control.

Credit and Recognition for Contributions to Data-Sharing Platforms Among Cohort Holders and Platform Developers in Europe: Interview Study

BACKGROUND

The European Commission is funding projects that aim to establish data-sharing platforms. These platforms are envisioned to enhance and facilitate the international sharing of cohort data. Nevertheless, broad data sharing may be restricted by the lack of adequate recognition for those who share data.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study is to describe in depth the concerns about acquiring credit for data sharing within epidemiological research.

METHODS

A total of 17 participants linked to European Union-funded data-sharing platforms were recruited for a semistructured interview. Transcripts were analyzed using inductive content analysis.

RESULTS

Interviewees argued that data sharing within international projects could challenge authorship guidelines in multiple ways. Some respondents considered that the acquisition of credit for articles with extensive author lists could be problematic in some instances, such as for junior researchers. In addition, universities may be critical of researchers who share data more often than leading research. Some considered that the evaluation system undervalues data generators and specialists. Respondents generally looked favorably upon alternatives to the current evaluation system to potentially ameliorate these issues.

CONCLUSIONS

The evaluation system might impede data sharing because it mainly focuses on first and last authorship and undervalues the contributor's work. Further movement of crediting models toward contributorship could potentially address this issue. Appropriate crediting mechanisms that are better aligned with the way science ought to be conducted in the future need to be developed.

Re-invent Yourself! How Demands for Innovativeness Reshape Epistemic Practices

In the current research landscape, there are increasing demands for research to be innovative and cutting-edge. At the same time, concerns are voiced that as a consequence of neoliberal regimes of research governance, innovative research becomes impeded. In this paper, I suggest that to gain a better understanding of these dynamics, it is indispensable to scrutinise current demands for innovativeness as a distinct way of ascribing worth to research. Drawing on interviews and focus groups produced in a close collaboration with three research groups from the crop and soil sciences, I develop the notion of a project-innovation regime of valuation that can be traced in the sphere of research. In this evaluative framework, it is considered valuable to constantly re-invent oneself and take 'first steps' instead of 'just' following up on previous findings. Subsequently, I describe how these demands for innovativeness relate to and often clash with other regimes of valuation that matter for researchers' practices. I show that valuations of innovativeness are in many ways bound to those of productivity and competitiveness, but that these two regimes are nevertheless sometimes in tension with each other, creating a complicated double bind for researchers. Moreover, I highlight that also the project-innovation regime as such is not always in line with what researchers considered as a valuable progress of knowledge, especially because it entails a de-valuation of certain kinds of long-term epistemic agendas. I show that prevailing pushes for innovativeness seem to be based on a rather short-sighted temporal imaginary of scientific progress that is hardly grounded in the complex realities of research practices, and that they can reshape epistemic practices in potentially problematic ways.