Professor Heike Jöns Inaugural Lecture

Understanding the uneven global geographies of science and scholarship through triadic thought: an intellectual journey from mobilities via practices to geopolitics

Science and scholarship are significant but contested fields of human praxis. Through the production of diverse cultural, scientific, and technological knowledge and innovation, science and scholarship have driven economic prosperity, cultural exchange, and considerable improvement in human health and wellbeing, yet they have also been identified as practices inextricably linked to warfare and powerful economic accumulation processes that have relied upon imperial dominance and exploitation in the development of an originally profoundly Eurocentric modern capitalist world economy. Understanding how science and scholarship have contributed to politically and culturally diverse yet geographically and socioeconomically highly uneven global knowledge economies has motivated much of my research over the past 25 years.

In this inaugural lecture, Heike Jons is revisiting this broader question by examining three main research foci:

• How transnational academic mobilities have shaped the rise and shift of global knowledge centres, involving distinctively gendered motivations, circumstances, and geographies but fairly gender-equal outcomes of research visits and sabbaticals abroad
• How a geographically differentiating perspective on different research practices across the sciences and the humanities has shed a different light on social theoretical debates about the very nature of knowledge production
• How contested geopolitics have not only shaped the internationalization of science and scholarship in the modern research university but also emerged from intellectual, cultural, and linguistic struggles across imperial and national borders 

Refreshments to be served from 4.30pm outside the lecture theatre for those attending in-person.