Events

Reflections on 'The Quantified Scholar'

Hosted by the Department of Sociology

Sheikh Zayed Lecture Theatre, United Kingdom

Speakers

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

Professor Sarah de Rijcke

Professor Sarah de Rijcke

Professor Sam Friedman

Professor Sam Friedman

Professor John Holmwood

Professor John Holmwood

Chair

Professor Fran Tonkiss & Professor Gurminder K Bhambra

Professor Fran Tonkiss & Professor Gurminder K Bhambra

Join us for this panel hosted by the Department of Sociology and The British Journal of Sociology. Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, in his superb new book, The Quantified Scholar, examines the research evaluation processes that are now a regular feature of academic life in the UK.

Since 1986, the British government, faced with dwindling budgets and growing calls for public accountability, has sought to assess the value of scholarly work in the nation’s universities. Pardo-Guerra examines how this evaluation and distribution has transformed British social science. Specifically, he asks how such attempts have quantified the worth of knowledge and thereby changed the nature of scholarship.

Join us for this panel discussing a variety of themes that emerge from The Quantified Scholar with the author, Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (UCSD) and panellists, Sam Friedman (LSE), Sarah de Rijcke (Leiden University), and John Holmwood (University of Nottingham). The panel will be co-chaired by Gurminder K Bhambra (University of Sussex) and Fran Tonkiss (LSE).

Meet the speakers

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra

University of California

Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra is an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, a founding faculty member of the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute, co-founder of the Computational Social Science program at UCSD, and Associate Director of the Latin American Studies Program at UC San Diego. His research concerns markets and their location in contemporary societies with an emphasis on finance, knowledge, and organizations. In Automating Finance: Infrastructures, Engineers and the Making of Electronic Markets (Cambridge University Press, 2019), for example, he examines the organizational and political tensions at play in developing some of the key infrastructures of British and American stock markets that automated trading in the late twentieth century.

Read more about Juan Pablo's work here.

Professor Sarah de Rijcke

Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS)

Sarah is a Professor in Science and Evaluation Studies & Scientific Director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden. She specialises in social studies of research evaluation, and has published widely on the topic of the relations between quality control mechanisms and knowledge production in different fields. She has also developed a strong international public academic presence with outreach activities in science policy, speaking frequently on the topic of research evaluation and metrics uses.

Read more about Sarah's work here.

Professor Sam Friedman

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Sam Friedman (@SamFriedmanSoc) is a Professor of Sociology at LSE. He has published widely on class, culture and social mobility and recently co-authored The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged. He is also the author of Comedy and Distinction: The Cultural Currency of a 'Good' Sense of Humour and co-author of Social Class in the 21st Century. He is currently working on a new book (with Aaron Reeves) looking at the historical development of the British elite.

Read more about Sam's work here.

Professor John Holmwood

University of Nottingham, Centre for Science Technology and Society Studies, Czech Academy of Science

John Holmwood is Professor Emeritus in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham and Senior Researcher in the Centre for Science Technology and Society Studies of the Institute for Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Science. He is co-founder (in 2013) and joint managing editor of Discover Society, a free online monthly magazine of social research, criticism and policy analysis. He was co-founder of the Campaign for the Public University (2010-2017). He was President of the British Sociological Association, 2012/2014. In academic year 2014/15 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Read more about John's work here.

Professor Fran Tonkiss

London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology, and Head of Department. Her research and teaching is in the fields of urban and economic sociology. Her research interests focus on urban inequalities, urban development and design, social and spatial divisions, and the socio-economic organisation of urban space.  Publications in these fields include Cities by Design: the social life of urban form (Polity, 2013), Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity, 2005), and Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalisation, Production, Inequality (Routledge, 2006). She is the co-author of Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory (Polity, 2001, with Don Slater), and co-editor of Trust and Civil Society (Macmillan, 2000, with Andrew Passey). She is currently managing editor of Economy and Society; she was previously an editor of the British Journal of Sociology, and remains a member of the editorial board.

Fran Tonkiss supervises doctoral students undertaking research on urban development, the economic and spatial structuring of cities, urban economies and inequalities.

Read more about Fran's work here.

Professor Gurminder K Bhambra

University of Sussex

Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the Department of International Relations in the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), elected 2020, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), elected in 2021. She is President of the British Sociological Association (2022-24) and is currently working on her Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship project (2022-24), ‘Varieties of Colonialism, Varieties of Empire’.

Read more about Gurminder's work here.

 

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