Interview: Geography of knowledge
Professor Peter Meusburger - full professor at the department of Geography, University of Heidelberg - heads the project "developments and effects of international academic relations ensuing from Humboldt Research Fellowships in Germany, 1953 - 1999"
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Peter Meusburger (Foto: privat).
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Kosmos: How did it happen that a social geographer got interested in the Humboldt Foundation?
Peter Meusburger: For about 30 years, one of my major fields of research has been something you might call "educational geography" or "the geography of knowledge". It is concerned with the spatial structures, disparities, and production processes, dissemination and application of knowledge, qualifications, and training. Regional differences in various kinds of knowledge are a significant structural element of the economy and society.
Recently, greater attention has been drawn to the fact that the social and infrastructure conditions under which knowledge is produced and disseminated also differ greatly according to place and discipline. The discourse and social interaction are not identical at all universities either, so that the place of research does not only influence the choice of topic and the methods used, but may also affect the research findings themselves.
The Humboldt Fellows and Award Winners provide an ideal investigative group on the basis of which it is possible to examine new questions in geographical scientific research empirically.
Kosmos: What is the major question, the central theory or thesis behind your investi gation of Humboldt Award Winners and Fellows?
Meusburger: The focus is the thesis that cross-border interaction and networks between academics significantly influence their academic achievements (originality, creativity). By contrast to the widely-held view that academia is per se international in character, we support the thesis that academic work is spatially structured in multifarious ways and that the circular mobility of academics contributes significantly to this structuring.
In the project carried out and completed by Dr. Jöns in 2001, the U.S.-American Humboldt Award Winners, who had spent several months researching at German universities or other research institutions between 1972 and 1997, were investigated. The following questions formed the focus of the research: Which networks exist amongst American and German top academics? Which German universities are considered particularly attractive and thus favoured for research stays by the elite of U.S.- American learning? What motivates American academics to come to Germany and, in retrospect, how do they evaluate their research stay and the academic scene in Germany? What are the consequences of these academic research visits on the German and American partners collaborating? What reasons would American Award Winners give for recommending or dissuading their assistants and doctoral students to spend time researching in Germany? What are the factors influencing interaction between German and American academics? During the U.S. Award Winners' academic careers, which places were integrated globally into the networks of this group of internationally leading academics? Which networks of protagonists were responsible for the Award Winners' visits coming about and which were newly-created by the stay in Germany?
The demand for international mobility also varies enormously according to discipline and field of work because differing ways of working academically are variously more or less dependent on specific spatial contexts. The interpretative- argumentative humanities scholars demand completely different things from international mobility than experimental physicists.
Kosmos: In the framework of a DFG-project on "Developments and Effects of International Academic Relations Ensuing from Humboldt Research Fellowships in Germany, 1953 - 1999", you are investigating the Humboldt Foundation's application and sponsorship figures. Can you already make any statements or recognize any trends inherent in the figures?
Meusburger: This new DFG-project has only just started and deals with Humboldt Fellows. They are considerably younger than the Award Winners, are often not yet full professors, and usually stay in Germany longer. By contrast with the first project we shall not only be investigating American academics but those from all over the world. Hence, this project gives rise to different research questions from the first. By comparing a multitude of countries of origin we can examine how differing political circumstances and economic conditions, various linguistic and cultural areas, national scientific systems, and the symbolic meaning of research contexts influence academic relations and what concrete effects they have had on the design and consequences of research stays in Germany.
Kosmos: What sources are your investigations based on?
Meusburger: The investigation completed was based on numerous sources. The three most important were a written survey of all Humboldt Award Winners from 1972 to 1996 (of the 1,566 Award Winners approached, 1,020 usable questionnaires were returned), anonymous data on people and stays from the Humboldt Foundation data base on all the nominators, nominees, and Award Winners (about 1,900 sets of data), and personal thematic interviews with 61 selected U.S. Award Winners and German post-docs in the U.S.A. The first two sources were particularly important for recording the spatial structures, mobility patterns, networks, and differences in attractiveness pertaining to the institutions of higher education. Using the third source we were able to investigate especially the subjective assessments and motivation of the U.S. Award Winners. The Humboldt Foundation's data base goes back a long time and contains very detailed sets of data on all the fellows since 1954.
Kosmos: What surprising results have you found?
Meusburger: The roughly 450-page dissertation by Dr. Jöns contains a wealth of surprising findings so that it is not easy to pick out a few. We had not expected, for example, that biographical connections to Germany would be such a significant factor, nor the considerable cultural differences in the organization of science in Germany and the U.S.A. and their concomitant consequences, nor indeed the enormous disciplinary differences in the production and dissemination of academic findings.
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