Chapter 8

In this chapter I want to keep to the turbulent research political period in Sweden during the 90s and focus on feminist research politics. Since the 90s the system for research funding has changed. The discrete research councils for ‘basic’ research was in 2001 merged into a joint Swedish Research Council (VR) at same time as the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN) was closed down. I am presenting some situated experiences, which is mostly connected to the actor with explicit assignments for feminist research, namely FRN. In order to slightly reduce the collective forgetfulness concerning feminist research politics, I am going into some detail about a Swedish Government Official Report (SOU) of the 90s.

When Gender is on the Agenda

Research political comments

Thanks to the efforts of a number of prime movers within the field, Swedish research politics in the 90s was putting gender on the agenda to an increasing degree. The discussions until then had focused on quantitative aspects of equality, such as how to increase the number of female researchers in technology and natural science, as well as the number of women in higher positions in the hierarchical structure of the universities, and how women can be given fair access to research funding (Wennerås 1995). However, when gender is on the agenda in a technoscientific context it would be better to start looking at the complicated and interrelated aspects of the making of technopolitics in the late modern research complex. In order to foster feminist research in this situation, frameworks for understanding characterized by transparency, context sensitivity and motivation to meet the relevant challenges in society need to be developed. We need to handle the twin aspects of research policy – science for policy and policy for science.

Feminist research has rarely been found among the issues addressed by research politics. However, we find in Sweden a number of professorships in feminist research in fields like history, sociology, economy, medicine and technology, which is intertwined with research political issues. These chairs have been suggested by the ministry of education and approved by the Parliament. In the Swedish context this has meant earmarked financial resources allocated to the universities, at which these chairs have been located.

Most of the academic research in Sweden is performed at the universities. In contrast to nearby countries very few autonomous research institutes exist in Sweden. The Parliament decides on allocation of basic (faculty) resources in the budget bill. These resources do not guarantee full salaries for research and higher education staff. External financing is necessary for research projects and programs, which constitute a comprehensive part of the economic base for PhD students and academic staff⁹³. The outcome of the competition for external financing has a major impact on the ability of staff to keep their jobs. It also holds important and deep going structural dimensions of gender. In order to get the benefit of external financing it is necessary to apply for resources mainly from the Swedish research councils, which can be either ‘basic’ research councils or more applied research funding authorities.

One central agent in Swedish research politics is the research bill presented to Parliament about every three or four years. The first research bill appeared in 1981. In the research bill of 1993⁹⁴, strategic research was given a high priority, with the main focus of investments directed towards (in order of financial size) the fields of technology, natural science and medicine, followed by strategic environmental research and research in the cultural sciences. In this bill a proposal was put forward, and subsequently approved, for a new chair in feminist research within the field of technology, to be located at the Faculty of Technology, Luleå University of Technology.

Since 1991 and until 2001, the Swedish Council for Planning and Coordination of Research (FRN) was responsible for the support of feminist research and research concerning equal opportunities. The impact of this was a substantial increase in and concentration on research applications and project proposals in the field of feminist research submitted to the FRN - feminist research located both within the traditional academic disciplines and in the newer inter/transdisciplinary fields of study. The central role of FRN in the promotion of feminist research was an important phase in the creation of a financial base for this kind of research and its significant consequences. However, this central role played by the FRN contributed at the same time to a lack of responsibility shown by the discipline based research councils and other research funding authorities for the increasing interest in feminist research projects. There are of course exceptions that proved the rule, such as the Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Council for Working Life Research.

Feminist research politics

As pointed out above, FRN had a special commitment within the Swedish system for funding research to support and develop research politics on feminist research⁹⁵. FRN was organized into programme committees, one of which handled project proposals for feminist research and equal opportunities research. Several calls were made for applications for general feminist and equality opportunities research projects. The committee did not give priority to any field in particular, the most obvious reason for this being the fact that very few other research funding authorities had shown any interest in supporting feminist research. However, one of the last calls from the FRN encouraged proposals in fields, where feminist research had not yet found a foothold, for instance in the natural sciences and technoscience.

The stream of feminist research projects included projects in a wide variety of areas and the number of projects increased every year. The budget allocation of the committee increased from SEK 3 million in 1991/92 to SEK 11 million 1995/96, due to changes in priorities within the total budget of FRN and by additional resources allocated by the Parliament. In the research bill to Parliament in 1993 it was emphasized that the committee should support activities in the fields of technology and natural science. The committee had, however, difficulties carrying out that exhortation. The large increase in number of project proposals was not followed up in research politics by a corresponding increase in resources. This meant the chances for having a proposal accepted continuously decreased and was less than half of the appropriation extent, compared with the other program committees of FRN. It should be mentioned that the relatively modest budget of FRN did not allow research projects to be fully financed, which was all too often the case in feminist research. The consequences of this situation were serious for the development of feminist research, especially for doctoral students and graduate researchers at the beginning of their academic career.

It is possible to identify the location of feminist research politics within FRN, which coincided with the research political role FRN was given and took. FRN, as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary research council, was taken upon itself the mission to initiate and support new areas of research, which could be likened to tender plants in a greenhouse - plants that had special needs for growth. In due time these new research areas should be strong enough to be transplanted out of the safe environment of FRN and be able to compete on equal terms for resources in the common research funding system.

When it comes to feminist research, FRN found itself in a unique situation. It was not necessary for FRN to encourage interest in this new research field among scientists at the universities. The interest was already overwhelming. Instead, the task of FRN became to find methods for handling the large number of proposals, to deal with the evaluation process as a particularly pressing problem on the one hand, and a great need to expand the financial framework on the other. There were at least six identifiable strategies for increasing resources.

The first strategy was simply to ask for more money in the so-called detailed budget request of FRN, which was to be incorporated in the research bill and the budget bill to Parliament. This method was not too successful. The second strategy was to change priorities in the total budget of FRN in favour of feminist research. This was already been done (see above). The resources needed for feminist research alone, however, would take up most of the total budget of FRN. It would not be reasonable to give such heavy priority to feminist research, taking into account the other important programs of FRN. Other solutions had to be found. One of the more promising solutions appeared to be active integration of feminist research into all other program committees of FRN. I will come back to this strategy below.

A fourth strategy for increasing resources was to co-finance projects with other research councils. There was no reason why this form of research funding not becoming successful for feminist research. Comprehensive and conscious efforts from FRN would be required to develop smooth networks and, more importantly, to establish firmly the significance of feminist research among other research councils. With respect to the universities, such efforts were not given priority in FRN with the result that co-financing of feminist research projects was not a feasible strategy. A fifth strategy would be for FRN to take seriously research political initiatives, also via the Ministry of Education, to influence other research councils and sector research authorities to assume the responsibility for financing feminist research within their particular fields of research. The government’s research bill presented to Parliament in 1996 was surprisingly clear about this point, see below and in chapter 9.

A sixth way of financing feminist research would be to follow the suggestion of the official report “The wish to know, the wish to understand”⁹⁶ that is, to establish a new research council exclusively for feminist research. For several reasons I find this suggestion problematic as it would counteract the expansion and integration of feminist research⁹⁷. The suggestion was not considered in the research bill 1996 and no separate feminist research council has yet been suggested by the government.

The establishment of evaluation processes within feminist research i.e. the selection of competent scientists, who can express an opinion about and judge project proposals, has proved to be difficult in a small country like Sweden. Within larger and more established research fields, for instance in technology, the existing network between Swedish scientists is considered to be too close, and the number of senior scientists too few, to recruit experts from Sweden alone. All applications must therefore be written in English in order to render possible judgments by researchers from outside the Nordic countries. Senior feminist researchers in Sweden are few and far between, especially within certain disciplines. Conflicts of interest, which must never be overlooked or underestimated and which will always exist, influence evaluation too strongly. Yet another phenomenon that further complicates the matter is the fact that feminist research is actually located both in the established disciplines and in the new inter/transdisciplinary fields of study. We will not get relevant judgments when, for instance, a sociologist evaluates feminist technoscience. This may be seen an obvious point, but it is not in the field of feminist research. Project applications related to feminist research need to be written in English to give us access to fresh and relevant evaluations by scientists outside Sweden and the Nordic countries. This problem could be solved, if feminist research is more firmly integrated into the different research councils, and if alternative criteria for the framework for evaluation are created (Gulbrandsen 1995c).

Technopolitical questions in feminist research

In the discussion above I have tried to steer myself away from the quantitative goals of equal opportunities issues, and towards identifying prerequisites for involvement of feminist research in the technoscientific matters at hand, and further to the present questions of research politics as a part of technopolitical movements. I would like to dwell a little upon the processes evolved within FRN, mostly because of the central role it played in research politics concerning feminist research. If there was any single place where you might find signs of shift in feminist research politics, it would have been within FRN. Accordingly, it was within FRN that we could identify new technopolitical tendencies by looking at the choices and changes in program committees and the priorities given to activities within these committees.

In one of the last detailed budget request⁹⁸, which was henceforth to be included in the research bill every third year, it was interesting to note that information technology gained a stronger position, in addition to the, from a research political view, interesting field of Science Studies⁹⁹. At the same time discussions about the location and aim/role of feminist research were taken place. In the FRN’s budget request it was suggested that the committee for feminist research and equal opportunities research should stay within FRN’s framework, but change its name to the committee for feminist research. Another idea discussed was that feminist research, wherever it is possible, should be integrated into the other program committees within the FRN. The Committee of Technology and Society was in the process of being merged with the Committee of Research on Library and Information Science. Within this amalgamated committee, information technology was given greater priority. The program suggested by the new committee contained an explicit commitment to the integration of feminist research:

By increasing the number of actors in the development of technology and in the production of reality, that this development involves, prerequisites are created to overcome the obstacles of techno-optimistic or techno-pessimistic attitudes. In this context integrated gender perspectives are important.¹⁰⁰

According to my interpretation of this program, it constituted a breakthrough in the technopolitical question of feminist research. The theoretical and methodical competence of feminist research could here be practised and developed in a technical context, at the same time as the transformative and evolving capacities of feminist research would be placed inside the technoscientific field and accordingly be given opportunities for involvement in dynamic processes of knowledge production. The program of the committee was turning the focus from what Sandra Harding (1986) calls the women question in science to the science question in feminism.

A noteworthy research political event occurred within feminist research in the fulfilment of FRN’s commission from the government to make a proposal for academic appointments in the field¹⁰¹. This happened during the spring of 1996. Having collected suggestions from all the universities in Sweden, in an attempt to solve problems of organizing the analysis work, in which both the committee of feminist research and equal opportunities research and the general secretary of FRN were involved, and after a thorough discussion of the challenges involved with certain members of the board of FRN¹⁰², the final proposal was delivered to the government to be incorporated into the research bill. FRN’s suggestion was to create one new professorship and to provide resources for one research assistant and one doctorate student in each of the fields of literature, sociology, medicine (people’s health science), human-machine interaction, history of technology and anthropology. However no specific geographic location was suggested. The outcome of the research bill was the same number of chairs and appointments but in slightly different fields to those suggested, namely literature, sociology, medicine (people’s health science), human-machine interaction, information technology and the didactics of physics.

Judging from the processes, which occur when feminist research is awarded resources, however modest, to expand, such investments evoked strong reactions, not only in the established academic community, but also and perhaps even stronger reactions among feminist researchers. Complex chains of events started when different interests were given a more or less free rein. The fact that at the time feminist research was the focus of attention for high status positions in the research complex, upset the gender neutral norm of the scientist’s identity and the myth of the apolitical content of research processes (compared to other ways of understanding such as its mythic, organic, technical, political, textual content etc. (Haraway 1991)). At the same time it raised questions about the academic career system and how problematic that can be for feminist researchers. How to balance the interest of the own individual academic career and the transformation goal of feminist research? It is easy to experience a contradiction in this balance.

In the light of involvement in technopolitics, the proposal for appointments of new chairs in information technology and human-machine interaction could mean a possibility of intervention for the field of feminist research. The potential for the intervention in technopolitics was dependent upon where the chair was located - either in traditional fields of consequence studies or integrated into transformation processes in a technoscientific contexts

The fact that two of the six suggested and later approved research fields were related to technology indicated the influential role of technology in directing and shaping society and its productions of reality with far-reaching consequences.

Official report as feminist research politics

The former Minister of Equality and deputy Prime Minister, Mona Sahlin, set up an official investigation with the dual aim of finding measures for promotion of feminist research and ways to achieve a more equal representation of women and men at all levels in the research complex. The investigation was presented in the Swedish Government Official Report SOU 1995:110, called The Wish to Know, the Wish to Understand - Gender, Power and the Women Research¹⁰³ Challenge in Postgraduate Education. This official report was submitted for consideration by the parties concerned, it was debated at length in the media, and, together with the conclusions drawn as a result of its considerations, it was taken into account in the research bill in case. The criticism of the official report, both from feminist researchers and male researchers in the established academic system, needs a more detailed presentation and analysis than given here. I will concentrate on the parts concerning technology.

In the report the technology field was commented upon in terms of statistics on resources allocated to women and female staff at universities and by different authorities. The discussion centred primarily around the representation of women. Apart from the comments made by the investigators, technology was treated on its own in my contributing text “The technoscience challenges in feminism”. A variety of different voices from female emeritus professors, female students and from some male professors can be heard in the report.

On the basis of the material gathered and from the proposals put forward in the report, the conclusion drawn shows feminist research was made almost invisible within the field of technology¹⁰⁴.

It is obvious that the technopolitical interest in the proposals of the investigation was minimal. Perhaps we should not be surprised, considering the aims and direction characteristic of current feminist research in Sweden and the phases this research has been involved in. One reason for this is the dominant position social sciences have in feminist research in Sweden and elsewhere, by understandable and good reasons. However this dominance provides only minor potential for technopolitical changes and transformations, which in turn have repercussions for the production of technical knowledge and problem solving. Another reason is that feminist research, to a great extent and indeed legitimately, is involved in “mapping” projects, which have not proved to yield the transformation potential we hoped for (or have we hoped?!). This focus draws attention away from the work of problematizing the foundations of technoscience, which is a prerequisite for the involvement of feminist research in technopolitics in relevant, interesting and transformative ways. I am quite aware of the fact that the feminist research I want to see developed demands sensitivity within the research complex and that is difficult to motivate. It demands great courage from the researcher, who sticks his/her neck out. I believe in and value highly strong inter- and transdisciplinary connections in research praxis. This cannot be overemphasized in efforts to bring about the changes discussed.

In the investigation, as well as in Swedish feminist research politics a double strategy is proposed. Feminist research is still a bait not easily swallowed, leading to the need for both an autonomous and an integrated position. The investigation moved the centre of gravity in the direction of the autonomous position, in its proposal for the establishment of a centralized feminist research authority and a research council exclusively for feminist research. The impact on feminist technoscience is easy to imagine - the inevitable engagement in the technopolitical issues and the technoscience question would be made extremely complicated, if not impossible. Moreover, the argument for demanding responsibility from the actors within the research funding system disappears. The various fields of feminist research in the humanities, social science, natural science, technology etc. should not have to compete with each other within a research council of their own, but should compete and demand their legitimate position from the financial authority to which each individual project belongs. If we do not do it this way, we will find ourselves quarrelling about scraps while the guys are playing around with the billions. Besides, we would then make it difficult to have influence beyond the confines of our own project, that is to make gender irrelevant as an epistemological factor¹⁰⁵.

A Research bill to parliament supporting feminist research

The most feminist friendly research bill to Parliament¹⁰⁶ so far was presented on 18 September 1996. Interesting differences can be noted compared to the former bill, which was dominated by the establishment of the research foundations. The former bill began with detailed reflections on the role of culture sciences (the humanities) in our society, followed by an overwhelming focus on technology, trade and industry, directed by the so-called “strategic research politics”. The politics of feminist research were almost entirely reduced to quantitative questions of equality - of the “more women in” kind. There was no problematization of the dominant norms in the production of knowledge except perhaps for the creation of the new professorship in gender and technology.

So what happened in the bill of 1996? I interpret it as a breakthrough of sorts. For the first time, we now had a research political document that consequently made a distinction between feminist research¹⁰⁷ and issues of equal opportunities. One of the greatest achievements in the bill with regard to feminist research politics can be found in the statement:

It is the view of the government that it is of significant importance that gender research is integrated into established research disciplines and that the ordinary research financing authorities allocate resources to feminist research.¹⁰⁸

These demands are followed up in the bill in the section dealing with the different sectors of the research complex.

The introductory parts of the bill also make quite interesting reading. We find here, in my opinion, a more relevant identification of the role and limitations of research activities in our society, also in the global context of environmental and survival crises. The political role of science is acknowledged in statements such as: How research resources are utilised is thus an important political question, The focus of research must fulfil the needs in society…all areas of society. These explicit declarations do not rule out the occurrence, every now and again in the bill, of a naive and oversimplified view of research as a truth-seeking activity performed by enthusiastic scientists doing ‘basic’ research with minimal awareness of the complex context dependency of knowledge production.

It is in section 3.7 of the bill, which concerns equal opportunities and feminist research, that we find an explicit discussion about our understanding of knowledge, which in my opinion ought to influence all other areas of issues, ministries, research councils etc. - namely:

The person who defines what constitute a scientific problem has an influence on the results of the research and consequently the world view science creates and the kind of technology developed.¹⁰⁹

Technology, trade and industry dominate this bill, for obvious reasons. As mentioned above the demands from the government concerning the integration of feminist research are followed up in consideration of different research sectors. For example, in the section on research into information technology (3.11.7) the government suggests “resources be allocated to a professor chair in information technology with gender perspective. This chair ought to contribute new aspects of IT development in society.¹¹⁰

I want to highlight one strategically important proposal in the bill in case, which had the potential to lead to a breakthrough in feminist research politics, especially in technoscience. The government proposed a so-called united action group¹¹¹ among the existing research councils¹¹². The instructions for the united action group focused three main issues - interdisciplinary research, feminist research and equal opportunities questions. The accompanying explanatory text in the bill states: Besides promoting interdisciplinary research the united action group ought to support an increasing awareness of gender perspectives in research and control and coordinate equal opportunity efforts¹¹³. A careful, ambitious and resolute handling of these opportunities would have potentials to create a basis for opening up all research councils for feminist research - a true research political challenge.

As mentioned above, the government proposed six chairs in feminist research and provided the additional resources in the bill. The impact of this increased allocation for feminist research was substantial, but by no means unproblematic. Three of the chairs were potentially in the field of technoscience and natural science (information technology, the didactic of physics, human machine interaction).

The research bill to Parliament was connected to a budget Bill. In the latter, the statement concerning support for feminist research was repeated in even more explicit terms:

Feminist research ought to be integrated into the ordinary research and in the research financing authorities, e.g. the research councils ought to allocate resources also to feminist research. Every research authority is obliged to participate in executing the measures and meeting the stated goals within its field of responsibility¹¹⁴.

Frames of evaluation

When gender is on the agenda, it becomes ever more crucial to discuss, deconstruct and reconstruct frameworks and processes of evaluation. The forceful movers and decisions made in a technopolitical context are influenced by evaluations that some feminist researchers regard very critically¹¹⁵. When technopolitics is located in a context of research politics, the frameworks of evaluation do not become less important or complex. In feminist research there is a potential for promoting transparency in the decision-making stages of the evaluation process.

Among the first things to stress is the political content of technoscience¹¹⁶. I am not referring to the consequences and political implications of technology, but the political content of the whole research process. When I transpose this consideration to the humanities, I run the risk of forcing open doors. If I, by contrast, bring up this discussion in a technical and natural scientific context, I commit a crime against the still dominant belief in neutrality of knowledge. The deep involvement of research activities in a political context is supposed to be kept hidden in order to uphold the status of research. The legitimacy of science is strongly connected to maintaining the myth of the neutrality of science and its apolitical content. The side effects of nurturing transparency in evaluation processes cannot be overestimated since the complexity of the processes is significant and the processes involved cannot possibly be viewed as obvious, even to a slight degree. The effects will shake the very foundations of our view of knowledge and raise the understanding of ourselves as profoundly mixed up agents in technopolitics, research politics and research. I can never locate myself innocently outside these processes.

Elisabeth Gulbrandsen (1995) states:

The reality producing / instrumental aspect of science and research demands devolvement of other forms of reflections; new forms for creating legitimacy, that are specific, concrete and detailed. More complex and integrated understandings of knowledge processes are needed in order to be able to give such localized and situated reflections.

The evaluation system in the scientific establishment and its functions has not been the object of any detailed and continued investigation. In the established forum where the discussion is taking place, it is the formal rather than the informal aspect of scientific quality control that is in question. One important contributions to the discussion can be found in the international project about production of knowledge, supported by the FRN. Some of the results are presented in the book The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. Its authors (Gibbons et al. 1994) write:

…scientific and technological knowledge production systems depend heavily and inherently on quality control. So long as science was a relatively simple, internal market of well-known, although novel products (for example scientists), quality control could depend on and be exercised primarily by members of the scientific elite itself on a largely informal basis. The process began with the education and selection of students, and was controlled subsequently through recruitment into the scientific community and to its elites by the mechanisms of peer review.

When the market expanded and became dependent on external, usually state funding, this informal peer review process was not replaced but rather supplemented by more bureaucratic forms of quality control exercised through committees, commissions and various other procedures. The claim of scientific excellence was maintained as the primary and overriding criterion for judging the knowledge produced and hence the knowledge producer. This chain therefore became an important mechanism for protecting the autonomy of the science system in the face of demands from the state and/or industry…in practice the difficulty of deciding priorities on the basis of a clear distinction between internal and external criteria remained. It is now generally admitted that internal criterion of scientific excellence per se is a necessary but not a sufficient selection criterion for establishing research priorities. Other criteria now influence the funding system. These require, both in themselves and in combination with other selection criteria, new procedures for evaluation.

Hopes and expectations

The possibilities for feminist research open up in the Swedish research political system in the middle of the 90s created a great deal of hope and expectation. We know the processes needed to be started in order to transform the possibilities, the formulated words on paper, into available and located resources, are highly complex, not straight forward and demand a lot of work and problematization.

We find ourselves in a rather peculiar situation of parallel processes. We are dealing with learning processes at the same time as we are trying to carry out research integration. On the one hand we must find out and thoroughly learn about relevant integration strategies. Valuable knowledge and experiences could be brought from interdisciplinary research, where obstacles similar to those facing feminist research exist. On the other hand, coincidental to learning processes of how to do it, we have to realize/effect the integration into the financial system for research. At what point will the expectations and concrete results converge - both in the short run and in a longer-term perspective? How can our expectations and hopes be turned into resources for the ongoing transformatory work?