Presenting and Valuating the Academic Self with the CV – Tracing hist...

Academic curricula vitae (CVs) are often carefully designed and maintained documents of auto/-biographical practices (Miller & Morgan 1993) by scientists and other researchers.

These practices are linked to expectations and self-perceptions that are specific to the fields (Bourdieu 2006) in which researchers are embedded. In my PhD-research, I address the question how researchers are being constructed as epistemic subjects (Knorr-Cetina 1999) in practices of presenting and valuating themselves and others based on academic CVs.

They play an important role in performing the “scientific self” (Daston & Galison 2007) and signalling “epistemic styles” (Lamont 2009). Whether and how a person is being recognized as a credible researcher depends on social processes of successfully ascribing such credibility. In this respect, CVs are part of diverse practices of valuation embedded in institutionalized processes of inclusion and exclusion. Reaching or keeping an academic position in contemporary audit culture normally involves CVs as “tools of assessment” (Ruth 2008). Researchers' CVs circulate in various formats, ranging from ‘classical’ CVs, included in grant and other applications, over personal entries on departmental websites, to academic social networks. In my talk I will focus on a part of my work that adds a historical perspective, tracing contexts (Asdal 2012) in which CVs emerged as part of academic institutions and everyday life. To do so, I will draw on findings from literature on CVs, and on the history of autobiography. I will also present examples from my own archival research on historical academic practices with CVs in Austria and Germany.