Maximilian Fochler

• Sigl, Lisa & Fochler, Maximilian (2025). Towards a “Hinterland” for Doing Relevance. A Typology of Practices and Competencies to Guide the Development of more Relevant Research and Career Paths. Minerva. ISSN 0026-4695. 63(2), p. 351–380. doi: 10.1007/s11024-024-09569-5. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Troubling diagnoses have been made about academic research cultures regarding their capacity to address social and environmental problems, challenging scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and related fields to consider the meanings of relevance, respective practices, and enabling conditions. This paper asks about practices by which research is aligned with reflections on the relevance of knowledge production, resulting in re-orientations in research (such as new questions or adjustments in methods and approaches) This paper pays particular attention to how researchers re-orient their research towards doing relevance in longer-term biographical processes and to how they contribute to creating respective hinterlands, i.e., conditions that bolster up these very practices as a more routinized, self-evident part of research. Through an iterative process of analyzing empirical material and an interdisciplinary literature review, we develop a typology of four practice areas (relating, re-valuing, situating, and synthesizing) that is actionable for researchers who wish to strengthen relevance in their work, both individually and in their wider fields and communities. We contribute to “transformation knowledge,” focusing on facilitating change towards doing relevance in academia and providing a vantage point to see opportunities for such change by combining a biographical perspective with the hinterlands metaphor. We conclude that academic institutions and research fields could build capacity for doing relevance more systematically by strategically growing a hinterland, for example, by building related competencies and infrastructures.

• Bieszczad, Sarah Rose; Fochler, Maximilian & Rijcke, Sarah de (2025). Diving into Relevance: How Deep Sea Researchers Articulate Societal Relevance within their Epistemic Living Spaces. Minerva. ISSN 0026-4695. 63(2), p. 205–229. doi: 10.1007/s11024-025-09577-z. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying. The field is currently in transition regarding its understanding of societally relevant research, as it has been criticised for failing to provide narratives that adequately demonstrate its societal relevance and the corresponding disconnect between its epistemic foci and the concerns of researchers, industry, and society more broadly. This transition is reverberating throughout ocean research institutions, prompting deep sea researchers to reconsider and re-articulate the relevance and applicability of their work. This article examines how deep sea researchers from two European ocean research institutes articulate the societal relevance of their work within their unique epistemic environments. Using a person-centred approach, we identify three ideal-type articulations of relevance: fundamental, translational, and solution-oriented. These articulations are shaped by financial, institutional, cultural, and media-related factors within the researchers' epistemic living spaces as well as their epistemic commitments to the creation of particular types of knowledge. Our findings reveal diverse understandings of societal relevance among deep sea researchers, even within single institutions. By focusing on these articulations, we frame relevance as an active process, highlighting the various actions researchers undertake to produce knowledge they perceive as relevant.

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