Knowledge, Universities, and Europe Under Transformation

The following propositions outline the core of my current intellectual and institutional agenda.
 

• Knowledge produced in semi-peripheral contexts reveals the structural asymmetries of global science.
  Rather than treating Central and Eastern Europe as a lagging region, I approach it as a vantage point from which the conditions of knowledge production become more visible: constraints, dependencies, and negotiated access to global circulation. This perspective emerges not only from theory, but from the practical realities of funding regimes, evaluation systems, and unequal participation in European research frameworks. These asymmetries are not incidental — they are structurally reproduced within the very systems that claim to mitigate them.
   
• Universities are becoming infrastructural actors within European policy and security systems.
  They no longer operate solely as institutions of research and teaching, but increasingly as nodes embedded in broader architectures — linking science, governance, funding regimes, and strategic priorities. This transformation is visible in areas such as research security, dual-use debates, and the growing role of large-scale infrastructures and coordinated funding instruments across Europe. Universities are no longer external to these systems — they are increasingly part of how they operate and are governed.
   
• The crisis of knowledge is not a lack of data, but a lack of interpretation.
  In a landscape saturated with information, the key challenge is not production but sense-making: the ability to interpret, connect, and critically situate knowledge within wider epistemic and institutional contexts. This becomes particularly evident in policy environments, where decisions are increasingly data-driven, yet often lack the interpretive frameworks necessary to understand their broader implications. What appears as evidence-based decision-making often masks a deeper deficit of conceptual clarity.
   
• The humanities do not disappear under pressure — they reorganize.
  Rather than declining, they are transforming their roles, methods, and institutional positions — often in response to external constraints that simultaneously limit and redefine their scope of action. This reconfiguration can be observed in their growing engagement with societal challenges, interdisciplinary environments, and their repositioning within research and funding systems. Their marginalization is therefore not an endpoint, but a condition that actively reshapes their function.

Together, these propositions frame my approach to knowledge as a situated, institutional, and interpretive practice shaped by asymmetry, constraint, and transformation.