Lynn Sibert: Research Security in Times of Geo-Economic Rivalry: Multiple Spatialities and Spatial Logics of De-Risking Sino-German Science Cooperation. [Abstract]

A growing number of international strategies aim to ensure economic security by building technological autonomy, reducing dependencies, and securing global competitive advantages. These strategies, which are discussed as an expression of a geo-economic shift, are not limited to the economy and trade. Rather, the concept of research security is emerging as a central component of current economic security strategies, which aim at cross-border knowledge production, knowledge transfer, and access to knowledge infrastructures. Based on ongoing multi-sited ethnography on current changes in Sino-German cooperation, this article examines the implications associated with the introduction of research security. The theoretical framework and conceptual research program of the re-figuration of spaces offers significant potential for analytically capturing the diversity of spatial scales and the current efforts to spatially reorganize cooperative knowledge production – particularly as reflected in recent risk assessment practices of German science organizations. Approaches to defining boundaries between safe and risky spaces for cooperative research point to attempts to transform open network structures into controllable knowledge routes.

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