Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers

Knowledge production in academia today is burgeoning and increasingly interdisciplinary in nature. Research within the humanities is no exception. In Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities, the contributors explore this transformative process. What are the implications, both for the modes of research and for the organisation of the humanities and higher education?

PhD Fellow Lasse Gøhler Johansson in cooperation with his colleague Jonas Grønvad, Aalborg University contributed to the book with the chapter "Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers". The chapter analyzes ways of doing research (research styles) in the humanities, including disciplines such as philosophy, history and linguistics. Based on a reading of Karl Mannheim and Ludwik Fleck, it constructs the concept of research style, which is defined as preferences for specific data types, analytical methods and arguments. Using data from a national survey among humanities researchers in Denmark in 2013 the chapter shows that the humanities are structured around four research styles: a quantitative, a qualitative, a text-based and an empirically pluralistic style. It also shows that these styles correspond to specific forms of extra-academic engagement, i.e. patterns in the orientation towards and interaction with audiences outside the academic world. The chapter draws on work by Kristoffer Kropp and Heine Andersen, also from the Department of Sociology, who conducted studies on the social sciences. This is the first study of its kind on the humanities.

Lasse Gøhler Johansson, "Research Styles and Extra-Academic Engagement of Humanities Researchers" in Mapping Frontier Research in the Humanities, eds. Claus Emmeche, David Budtz Pedersen and Frederik Stjernfelt, Bloomsbury, 2016.