Transdisciplinarity: a new mode of governing science?

What exactly does it mean to integrate extra-academic types of knowledge, interests and values into the procedures of scientific knowledge production? In this paper, we shall approach these questions from a ‘lab study perspective’, investigating the discourses and practices that constitute doing transdisciplinarity. Based upon an ongoing empirical research project, we call for a novel perspective: the task of producing ‘socially robust knowledge’, often couched in terms of extended responsibility of science vis-á-vis society, can also be regarded as a specific instance of neo-liberal rationality in research practice and science policy, at large. As scientific claims to accountability and truth have come under critique throughout the last decades, they now have to be reworked on the micro-level of transdisciplinary projects. Transdisciplinarity is thus revealed as a new mode of governing science in society.