Seminar
Navigating Academic Evaluations: Logics of Judgment in Promotion Review
- Łukasz Remisiewicz
- Date
- Friday 20 June 2025
- Time
- Series
- CWTS Research Seminars
- Location
- Online only
About the seminar
This presentation is based on the forthcoming book Academic Judgments Between Logics of Truth and Game (Brill, 2025), which offers a new theoretical perspective on peer review. Drawing on the works of Michèle Lamont, Randall Collins, and Pierre Bourdieu, the author introduces a logics of judgment framework, distinguishing between:
- The logic of truth, which evaluates research based on methodological and theoretical rigor.
- The logic of the scholarly community game (game-S), which considers disciplinary conventions and academic prestige.
- The logic of the evaluation game (game-E), which aligns with metricization and policy-driven criteria of excellence.
Using qualitative and quantitative analyses of 195 habilitation proceedings and 474 reviews, the research investigates how these logics shape academic judgments, particularly in cases involving conflicting assessments.
This presentation will focus especially on so-called borderline proceedings—cases characterized by particularly conflicting or ambiguous reviews. Through the lens of the logics of judgment theory, the author will address the following questions:
- Can the final outcomes of these proceedings be logically and coherently explained through a comprehensive analysis of the reviewers' arguments?
- Which logics are most influential in determining outcomes in such cases?
The talk aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of academic evaluation processes, with implications for both national and international research assessment cultures.
About the presenter
Łukasz Remisiewicz holds a PhD in Sociology and is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Sociology, University of Gdańsk, Poland. He is the author of Academic Judgments Between Logics of Truth and Game (Brill, 2025) and Examination in Sociological Perspective (in Polish, University of Gdańsk Press, 2016), as well as numerous articles. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside, as a Fulbright Program fellow (2018–2019). His current research focuses on valuation and evaluation processes in academia, particularly emphasizing judgments in promotion proceedings and the evolving role of metrics in peer reviews.