Part I

Fundaments for Societal Relevance and Trust

How is it possible to pursue an academic work, which in its nature requires that learned trues, theories and methodological approaches are questioned? This challenging ambition doesn’t arise as an end in itself but is emerging in my choices to work in different contexts and functions. To be relevant in both the faculty areas I belong to and in increasingly distributed forms of cooperation may seem to be an obvious statement. But the conditions for academic relevance and societal relevance are different. It became particularly clear to me in the research politic work, which I became involved in during the 90s. The different conditions are also a common experience for many feminist researchers and interdisciplinary researchers. Societal relevance and trust are key words for me, which brought me very quickly to go into problematizing the fundaments of science i.e. ontoepistemological (Barad 2007) bases of science. I ended up in the work of touching the raw nerves of the dominant academic discourse.