The Contested Worth of Academic Knowledge

Universities, as public organisations, are increasingly required to demonstrate their worth. Governments and publics ask what research is for, who benefits from it, and whether public investment in it is justified. These demands have intensified in a period of declining public funding and trust, along with open political hostility to academic work in several countries. With closures to departments and staff redundancies, universities appear to adopt and contribute to their diminishing value. How the worth of academic knowledge is specified, defended, and criticised has become a question with material consequences for what research is funded and which forms of knowledge persist.

This session invites papers that examine how the value of academic knowledge is publicly constructed and contested. We welcome work on the criteria and vocabularies through which research is justified, including notions of excellence, impact, relevance, and public good, and on the assessment regimes, metrics, and funding instruments that put those criteria into practice. We are equally interested in resistance and critique, whether from inside universities or from governments, the media and social movements, and in how academics themselves navigate competing demands.

Contributions may be conceptual or empirical, single-country or comparative, and may draw on any relevant theoretical tradition. We particularly encourage papers that situate the justification of academic knowledge within wider conditions of political and economic turbulence, and that consider how these dynamics differ across national and disciplinary settings. The session aims to clarify how academic knowledge is valued, and on what terms its worth is granted.