Diving into Relevance: How Deep Sea Researchers Articulate Societal Relevance within their Epistemic Living Spaces

The deep sea is many things: a subject of both fascination and indifference; a realm of great unknowns and scientific inquiry; and a source of untapped potential and looming exploitation. Its multifaceted nature is also visible in scientific research on the deep sea. While traditional relevance narratives in the field of deep sea research centred around fundamental knowledge creation, calls for doing societally relevant research are intensifying. The field is currently in transition regarding its understanding of societally relevant research, as it has been criticised for failing to provide narratives that adequately demonstrate its societal relevance and the corresponding disconnect between its epistemic foci and the concerns of researchers, industry, and society more broadly. This transition is reverberating throughout ocean research institutions, prompting deep sea researchers to reconsider and re-articulate the relevance and applicability of their work. This article examines how deep sea researchers from two European ocean research institutes articulate the societal relevance of their work within their unique epistemic environments. Using a person-centred approach, we identify three ideal-type articulations of relevance: fundamental, translational, and solution-oriented. These articulations are shaped by financial, institutional, cultural, and media-related factors within the researchers' epistemic living spaces as well as their epistemic commitments to the creation of particular types of knowledge. Our findings reveal diverse understandings of societal relevance among deep sea researchers, even within single institutions. By focusing on these articulations, we frame relevance as an active process, highlighting the various actions researchers undertake to produce knowledge they perceive as relevant.