The public life of the university/academic: en analysis based on Actor-Network Theory.

The current condition of the university is subject of profound debate. Over the last years, it has
become clear that the university is facing important challenges on the one hand, and increasing
societal demands on the other hand. The main research interest of this dissertation is to come to a
more profound understanding of the university today, with a special focus on what the role of digital
actors is herein, but without placing emphasis on such (contextualizing) evolutions. Rather than that,
the university is approached through concrete daily academic practices in which both social
(academics, students, …) and material (computers, paper, …) actors are situated.
In order to investigate the university likewise, this dissertation adopts a research approach that is
largely inspired by two theoretical vantage points: a sociomaterial and a sociotopological approach.
The combination of these approaches will enable to analyze academic practices through the relations
between actors present in these practices, instead of solely focusing on (the experiences or
interpretations of) these actors as such.
In this sociomaterial and sociotopological vein, four empirical studies were conducted. The first two
studies are focusing on the composition of academic practices by interviewing professors about their
previous working day. Based on these interviews, this composition was scrutinized by deploying
network visualizations as a central means of analysis and that present how (and which) multifarious
actors are related to each other, in order for academic practice to be able to function. These
networks, which bridge qualitative and quantitative methods, constitute the focal points of analysis
in order to come to an understanding of academic practices, and this by analyzing the relations
between social, material and digital actors present in these practices. These studies concretely present
how academic practice is constituted nowadays (consisting of a broad network of heterogeneous
actors and the relations that are established between these actors); how it is distributed (how
academic practice crystalizes into different regions of activities); and finally how it is associated (how
different regions relate to each other). Furthermore, three profiles are discerned that present typical
academic forms, presented in the form of an atlas.
The two other studies originate from an ethnographic research stay conducted at two research
centers. One study specifically focuses on the role of the digital in contemporary academic practices,
and more particularly on the prototypical device that is associated with the digital, that is, the screen.
This study analyzes the operations performed by the screen, and more particularly, what comes to
the fore when analyzing the screen as an active actor rather than as a merely transmitting or
displaying medium. In doing so, this study makes clear how academic practice is shaped through the
screen; what needs to be put in place in order for this screen to be able to operate; the different roles
that screens perform; and finally how the screen might be in tune, or rather precisely out of sync,
with the human actors present in different practices.
The fourth and last study poses the question as to whether there is something specific about what
we often unreflexively denote as ‘academic’. In order to come to an answer to this question, we
adopt the notion of ‘mode of existence’ and scrutinize whether or not there are typical ways to exist
as an academic. The notion of ‘existing’ is more particularly tied to the notion of ‘attachment’. That
is, in this last study we assert that what it means to exist as an academic can be investigated by
scrutinizing what academics are precisely attached to. On the basis of four different types of
attachments, we argue that the typical way of existing as an academic nowadays consists of what we
designate as ‘distancing in action’, i.e. a continuous mobilizing of what is not present and a
continuous search for slowing things down.