Chapter 13: On the Chronopolitics of Academic CVs in Peer Review

Curricula vitae (CVs) of researchers play an important role in the reproduction of the scientific workforce. They are routinely consulted in competitive assessment contexts, for example, peer review for funding programs and tenure decisions. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the quality of an applicant’s résumé is often a very important factor in the decision-making in such settings, even beyond the formal weight that specific review guidelines actually accord to them. At the same time, very little research has looked empirically at how CVs are used and interpreted in peer review (Hammarfelt & Rushforth, 2017; Kaltenbrunner & de Rijcke, 2019; Musselin, 2009). In this chapter, we focus on a particular aspect of the use of biographical evidence in evaluation, namely its role in representing but also reshaping temporal order in scientific work. CVs have a special relation to the temporal organization of science, in a variety of ways. First, they encourage a trajectoral interpretation (Hammarfelt, Rushforth, & de Rijcke, 2020; see also Fochler, Felt, & Müller, 2016) – they represent biographies under the assumption that these allow for tracing a gradual unfolding of scientific potential. Also, there is a common view that CVs should be interpreted in the context of the respective area of research to make sense. Different disciplines are often thought to be characterized by distinct rhythms of knowledge production, which implies that individual career accounts can be meaningfully assessed only when seen against field-specific norms (Kaltenbrunner & de Rijcke, 2019).