The aim of these informal meetings is to provide an opportunity to hear about colleagues' research projects, questions, and methods. The dean hopes that this meeting will see the same fruitful interdisciplinary interaction as the previous ones. The presentations and discussions are in English.

Paul Wouters: (The) Performance (of) Measurement

In this presentation, I will discuss the research agenda of the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in the light of the history of research evaluation by performance indicators. The need for formal indicators of research performance (such as numbers of publications and citations) has gradually developed as a consequence of the growth in size and complexity of the scientific system. I will discuss how these indicators have interacted with the traditional peer-review system in science and scholarship.

In the second half of the presentation I will discuss the four research themes that I wish to explore in the coming years: the impact of evaluation processes on the primary process of knowledge creation; the mathematical properties of complex performance indicators (and why the Journal Impact Factor of the Hirsch Index should not be used in research assessments); data visualization and the new ways of mapping scientific and technological developments; and the use of more hybrid data sources in CWTS research.

Bart Barendregt: Funky but Shariah, Sonic Discourse on Muslim Malay Modernity

Bart Barendregt will briefly introduce a recently launched NWO project that analyzes the interplay between the production of popular music, the articulation of modernity, and the emergence of new audiences, lifestyles and related processes of social differentiation in 20^th century Southeast Asia. Theoretically, the project engages the debate on modernity’s articulation in non-Western contexts within a comparative, historical framework (1903-2010). In his own contribution to the project, a monograph entitled ‘Funky but Shariah’, he dwells on nasyid, a popular music genre that since the mid-1990s has been popular across Muslim Southeast Asia, but is especially produced and consumed in cities and towns with a large student population and a Muslim activist tradition.

Nasyid music is the auditory component of a newly styled Islamic popular culturethat has been successful in not only addressing questions about what it is to be a modern Muslim youth in Southeast Asia, reconciling piety with a consumerist lifestyle, but also had been expressive of their political aspirations. In Malaysia nasyid has been instrumental in propagating the ideals of the now banned Darul Arqam movement, whereas Indonesian nasyid musicians and their audiences are explicitly linked to the aspirations of the Islamist Justice Party (PKS). Both organizations have been successful in addressing the needs of young well-educated Muslims, offering them a perspective of a more righteous, utopian style communal society.