As science becomes more political researchers seek to understand what that means
Staffan Edling, postdoctoral researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, is part of a four-year international research collaboration that has secured 1.1 million euros in funding from VolkswagenStiftung to explore how political expectations shape scientific practice.
CollaborationsResearchdemocracy
Written 24 September, 2026 06:29 by Theis Duelund Jensen
Science is increasingly expected to solve societal challenges, inform policy, and remain accessible to the public while also maintaining its independence, rigour, and autonomy. A new international research project led by researchers from IT University of Copenhagen, Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Barcelona will examine how these often competing expectations shape scientific practice.
The project, SCIPRESS (Science Under Pressure), has received funding for four years from VolkswagenStiftung through its Wissen über Wissen programme. Led by co-principal investigators Staffan Edling (ITU), Cornelia Schendzielorz (Humboldt University) and Just Serrano Zamora (University of Barcelona), the interdisciplinary collaboration brings together sociology and philosophy to investigate the relationship between science and politics.
The project will fund two postdoctoral researchers and a research assistant, while drawing on the expertise of an international advisory group that includes Monika Krause from the London School of Economics and Frieder Vogelmann from University College Freiburg.
How political expectations shape science
The researchers start from a simple observation: science has become increasingly central to political decision-making, while policymakers, funders and the public place growing demands on researchers.
According to Staffan Edling, the project seeks to understand how those demands influence scientific work in practice.
“We're interested in how political expectations on science and what science is affect scientific research practice. Science is expected to be useful and societally relevant, but it's also expected to be independent from societal pressures. It's expected to be open and accessible, but also highly specialised and methodologically rigorous,” he says.
To explore these tensions, the team will study organisations that operate at the intersection of science and politics, including think tanks, policy-oriented research institutes, NGOs and research-based social movements. Through interviews, participant observation and document analysis, the researchers will investigate how scientists navigate competing demands around impact, participation, transparency and independence.
The project introduces the concept of “epistemic-political orientations” to analyse the assumptions that shape both political expectations of science and scientists’ responses to them. By comparing cases across the Nordic countries, Germany, and other international contexts, the researchers aim to identify both common patterns and context-specific dynamics.
Understanding science in an age of complexity
The project arrives at a time when issues such as climate change, artificial intelligence and public trust in expertise have moved questions about knowledge production to the centre of public debate.
Rather than treating science and politics as separate spheres, SCIPRESS will examine how they increasingly interact and influence one another.
“Science and technology have become so much more important for politics over the last decades,” says Edling. “For that reason, we need a better understanding of how science works in relation to politics, but also how knowledge works in politics, how it is taken up, worked with and what kinds of assumptions go into that.”
Over the next four years, the SCIPRESS team will conduct extensive fieldwork and comparative analysis, culminating in academic publications, practitioner-focused outputs, and an international conference bringing together researchers, policymakers and stakeholders. The ambition is to develop a new understanding of how democratic expectations shape scientific practice and, in turn, how science contributes to democratic life.
Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, phone +45 2555 0447, email thej@itu.dk