Research projects and other activities

The aim of the project is to incorporate into the scientific curriculum of Czech upper secondary schools, elements of hitherto mainly academic Philosophy of Science and Science Studies (sociology, anthropology and history of science). In order to promote the concept of science literacy, we will build on the emphasis these disciplines put on the description and interpretation of the real course of scientific activity. Scientific literacy will thus acquire a natural connection to the issue of citizens’ public engagement as a precondition of social resilience. Our collaboration with selected secondary schools will allow us to design and test specific educational innovations (in physics, chemistry and biology). The project will result in concrete proposals for RVP G and RVP DG amendments.

The project “Scientific Literacy for the 21st Century Society” seeks to find ways in which the so far primarily academic social science studies (Science Studies) could enter the gymnasium teaching of natural sciences. The ultimate aim of the project is to strengthen the “scientific literacy” of Czech society, whose concept it interprets in a specific way.

The project aimes at improving the regulation of construction activities in protected landscape areas (with emphasis on PLAs Křivoklátsko and Český kras as model areas). We want to examine what this regulation is, how it comes into being and what its effects are, and propose recommendations on how to make it more effective and more politically legitimate. We will use the long-term experience of transdisciplinary work at our institute, combining competencies in the fields of architecture and urban planning, sociology and ecology (landscape protection).

The proposed research focuses on a specific tension in residential care for people identified as disabled: the tension between care for the residents, enabling them to live their lives as "normally" as possible, and care for the residences, safeguarding their economic and "cultural" worth. In the Czech Republic, the residential institutions are often housed in former castles, monasteries or historical villas, which are similarly out-of-shape, fragile and unattached as their inhabitants. And although care for people and maintenance of things might seem to be two dcompletely different and unrelated activities, they go hand-in-hand and cannot be separated. Our research will contribute to the recent turn of social sciences towards interest in materialities and ethical values of caring. We will analyze a single field of practice as framed by several diverging logics and sets of values, paying attention to how this multiplicity is managed. We also hope that our research will help to improve living and working conditions in residential care facilities.

Scholarly peer-reviewed journal for qualitative research in the social sciences (ISSN 1211-5770) - I was its editor-in-chief since it was established in 1994 until 2008; in 2009-2016 I was member of the editorial team.

Currently the journal is published tri-annually in both paper and internet (online) versions (http://www.biograf.org). It features original papers, translations, exchanges, review essays, reports and other minor genres of academic writing.

An international and transdisciplinary research project supported within the EC 7th framework program (FP7-Fission-2010, 269906).

Involved researchers come from Great Britain, Germany, Sweden, France, Hungary, Spain, Finland, Slovenia and Czech Republic. The project aims at identifying the main socio-political challenges for implementing geological disposal of radioactive waste and their interplay with technical challenges. It will furthermore provide the IGD-TP with concrete suggestions on how to address these entangled socio-technical challenges.

Research framework programme of the Center for Theoretical Study (Charles University in Prague and Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) and Dept. of philosophy and history of natural sciences, Faculty of Sciences (Charles University in Prague), headed by David Storch.

The research framework programme gathers collaborators from various disciplines: physics (Roman Kotecký, Bedřich Velický, František Slanina); mathematics (Petr Kůrka, Kateřina Trlifajová, Bohuslav Balcar); macro-ecology (David Storch, Arnošt L. Šizling); biology (Anton Markoš, Karel Kleisner); sociology of science (Zdeněk Konopásek, Jan Paleček); and philosophy (Ivan M. Havel, Zdeněk Kratochvíl).

In this qualitative sociological research we will study how (mainly catholic) pastoral practice treats spiritual experiences of apparition or demonic possession. E.g., how it happens – by practical means of religious life and devoutness – that a vision is accepted as a kind of apparition? Or, quite often, that it is suppressed, privatized and turned into a psychical effect such as delusion? What qualities of such a spiritual experience are regarded as relevant? What rules, norms and imaginaries are mobilized at such occasions? How are these experiences made accountable and collectively shareable? How they are disputed, evaluated, and doubted? Or, eventually, affirmed and appreciated as religious realities? In fact, we intend to carry out an in-depth study of phenomena that are so unbelievable that their acceptance is always (more or less) in risk of being classified in terms of psychopathology or mental illness, but that are (precisely as unbelievable, super-natural and unexplainable by scientific means) key and carefully defined elements of widely accepted religious belief.

The expert group on "Science and governance" was invited to perform the following tasks: (1) Analyse the uneasiness which is pervading the relations between science, civil society and policy-making. (2) Analyse the strengths and limits of current solutions to this uneasiness. (3) Suggest appropriate conceptual approaches which frame the interactions between science, society and policy-making. (4) Formulate recommendations for more effective science-related governance. The group was headed by Brian Wynne and Ulrike Felt; among its members were, e.g.: Michel Callon, Sheila Jasanoff, Pierre-Benoit Joly, Stefan May, Arie Rip and Andy Stirling. The following report was published as the output of more than two-years long collective work: FELT, U. / WYNNE, B. (2007): Science and governance: Taking European knowledge society seriously. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. 95 s.

Sociological research project, supported by the Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; Jan Paleček - grant holder, Zdeněk Konopásek - research collaborator.

In the proposed two-years research studied how psychiatry encounters the phenomena of hearing voices or having apparitions, i.e., quasi/spiritual and quasi/religious experiences. Using qualitative data from interviews and ethnographical observations in psychiatric facilities, we focused on individual illness trajectories, encounters of patients with psychiatric professionals and practical institutional and material arrangements of the treatment. By revealing how religiosity and mental disease are jointly and practically performed by means of contemporary psychiatry, in our case studies on mental patients we intended to better understand how the spiritual and religious experiences of mental patients are translated into the psychiatric language, what are medical, social and political consequences of these processes and what religiosity, spirituality and mental illness is. We hoped to contribute, by our research, to cultivation of contemporary and future reforms of psychiatry.