Crafting a Career in STS: Meaning Making, Assessment, and Interdisciplinary Engagement

Abstract

Drawing on her own biography, Ruth Müller opens her contribution by reminding us of the strong interdisciplinary roots and entanglements of STS as a field, as well as of its emancipatory political agenda. This rich history creates multiple valences for defining the worth of work in our field, ranging from scholarly excellence over successful interdisciplinary collaborative engagement to assembling matters of care and concern. Building on this, she analyzes how current indicatorized career dynamics render it increasingly difficult to derive a sense of meaning from one’s own work that builds on a successful integration of these multiple valences. She calls for developing “standards of our own,” that is, ways of defining quality and processes of accountability that do better justice to the multiple valences of our field.