Towards a “Hinterland” for Doing Relevance. A Typology of Practices and Competencies to Guide the Development of more Relevant Research and Career Paths

Abstract

Troubling diagnoses have been made about academic research cultures regarding their capacity to address social and environmental problems, challenging scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and related fields to consider the meanings of relevance, respective practices, and enabling conditions. This paper asks about practices by which research is aligned with reflections on the relevance of knowledge production, resulting in re-orientations in research (such as new questions or adjustments in methods and approaches) This paper pays particular attention to how researchers re-orient their research towards doing relevance in longer-term biographical processes and to how they contribute to creating respective hinterlands, i.e., conditions that bolster up these very practices as a more routinized, self-evident part of research. Through an iterative process of analyzing empirical material and an interdisciplinary literature review, we develop a typology of four practice areas (relating, re-valuing, situating, and synthesizing) that is actionable for researchers who wish to strengthen relevance in their work, both individually and in their wider fields and communities. We contribute to “transformation knowledge,” focusing on facilitating change towards doing relevance in academia and providing a vantage point to see opportunities for such change by combining a biographical perspective with the hinterlands metaphor. We conclude that academic institutions and research fields could build capacity for doing relevance more systematically by strategically growing a hinterland, for example, by building related competencies and infrastructures.