Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South E-Book

Fernanda Beigel

• Herausgeber: EDIUNC
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Encuentros Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 465

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Since 1960, an unequal international structure is recognized in terms of production and circulation of knowledge in the international science system. This phenomenon is called academic dependency and motivated actions towards promoting the education of scientist and stimulating the bond between institutions and scholars of the periphery. This, considering that the peripheral knowledge-production structures were compromised by colonialism and its lasting effects.

Leseprobe

EDIUNC, 2014

SEPHIS

Academic dependency and professionalization in the South: perspectives from the periphery / Fernanda Beigel ... [et.al.] ; coordinado por Fernanda Beigel y Hanan Sabea. - 1ª ed. - Mendoza: EDIUNC; Rio de Janeiro: SEPHIS, 2014.(Encuentros; 5) E-Book. Traducido por: Sebastián Touza y Cecilia Pereyra ISBN 978-950-39-0304-9. 1. Políticas de Educación. 2. Política Científicas científicas. 3. Enseñanza Universitaria. I. Beigel, Fernanda II. Beigel, Fernanda, coord. III. Sabea, Hanan, coord. IV. Touza, Sebastián, trad. V. Pereyra, Cecilia, trad. CDD 379.2

Legal deposit has been made as provided by Law 11723

© EDIUNC, 2014

Edition: Fernanda Beigel and Hanan Sabea

Direction: Pilar Piñeyrúa

Proofreading: Juan López and Erik Marsh

Translation: Sebastián Touza and Cecilia Pereyra

Cover photo: Juan Manuel Moreno

Cover design: María Teresa Bruno and Leandro Esteban Vallejos

E-book production: Lucía Domenech and Juan Pablo Del Peral

Table of contents

§

Preface: SEPHIS and a Critical Look at Academic Dependency in Today’s World

Introduction

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I.

The Research Field and Recent Contributions

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The Nationalist Approachand the Perspective from the Periphery

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II. Disciplining the Social Sciences: Questions of Value and Conversions in the South

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A Story of a Story: Histories of Social Science Production and Circulation in MENA

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III. The Second Workshop on Academic Dependency and the Organization of this Book

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References

SECTION A: Conceptualization and Theoretical Debate

Chapter 1: Academic Dependency: The Intellectual Challenge

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Defining Academic Dependency

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Dependency on Ideas: Eurocentrism in the Curricula

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Dependency on Recognition

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A Project to Reverse Academic Dependency

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The Sociology of José Rizal

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Conclusion

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References

Chapter 2: Cultural Components of Social Science in the Global Age

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Natural and Social Sciences in the New Setting

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Persistence and Change in the Global/Local Dichotomy

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Trends in the Production of Authoritative, Certified Knowledge

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Critical Reconstruction of the Biased/ Reductionist, Global Agenda

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Inexhaustible Cultural Diversity and Alternative Ways of Doing Things

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Conclusion

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References

Chapter 3: The Problematic of “Indigenous” and “Indigeneity”: South Asian and African Experiences

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Anthropology, the Colonial Episteme and Nationalism

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Nationalism and Framing of Modern Sociology: D. P. Mukerji’s Sociological Imagination

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The African Renaissance and the Framing of an African sociology

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Conclusion

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References

SECTION B: Internationalization and Academic Autonomy in Historical Perspective

Chapter 4: Middle Classes and Pan American Networks: Building a Class for Social Change

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The Pan American Project

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The Study of the Middle Classes

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The Size of the Middle Class and Its Contribution to Social Change

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The Middle Class in Argentina

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The Agreement between Local and International Agendas

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References

Chapter 5: “There is No Development without Experts”: International Cooperation and the Education of Public Administration Professionals in Chile

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International Cooperation: “There is No Development without Experts”

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The Education of Public Administrators and Political Scientists in Chile

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FLACSO’s ELACP, a Case of Foreign Cooperation and Academic Autonomy

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The Role of Foreign Aid in the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the University of Chile

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Conclusions

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References

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Archival Sources

Chapter 6: Professional trajectories as a route to the legitimization of Sociologists: Notes on the Chilean Case

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The Symbolic Possessions of Sociology in Chile

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The Social Construction of Disciplinary Identity

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The Origin of the Prestige of Sociology in Chile

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The Period of Symbolic Dispossession of Chilean Sociology

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Conclusions

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References

Chapter 7: Questions on Internationalization of Research Groups, Student Mobility and Brain Drain

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International Student Mobility: A Dependency Indicator?

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Return, Reconnection and Repatriation: Variations Around Highly Qualified Migration

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The Internationalization of Scientific Elites: A Large-scale Phenomenon?

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Conclusion

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References

SECTION C: Peripheral Proffesionalization and Academic Dependency

Chapter 8: Alternatives to Hegemonic and Eurocentric Agendas of Socio-environmental Research: An Experience Based on the Zapatista Case

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Decoloniality: A Theoretical Alternative to Hegemonic Research Agendas

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The Ricardo Flores Magón Autonomous Zapatista Municipality (MAREZ): A Scenario for Visualizing Non-Dependent Forms of Research

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Historical Highlights of the Lacandon Jungle Population

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Biocoloniality: An Example of Interpretation Influenced by Academic Dependency

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Bioprospecting

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Environmental Services

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Ecotourism

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Oil Palm Crops to Produce Biofuel

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The Role of Research in the Solution of Socio-Environmental Conflicts and the Search for Alternatives to Hegemonic Agendas

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Conclusions

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References

Chapter 9: A Case of Financial Dependency: Scientific Policy during the Argentine Military Dictatorship (1976–1983)

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Expansion and Decentralization of the National Science System as policy goal: a priority of the ——……—Argentine Military Government

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Origin, Evolution, and Corollaries of the Role of the LADB in Latin America

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The IADB–Conicet Loan: Weights and Counterweights of a Case of Financial Dependency

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Final Remarks

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References

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Archival Sources

Chapter 10: Academic Dependency and Scholarly Publishing among Social Scientists at Selected Universities in Nigeria

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Social Relations of the Quest for International Publishing

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International Publishing and Local Dissemination Outlets

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International Publishing and the Career of Social Scientists

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Conclusion

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References

Chapter 11: “Citizen of the World” or a Local Producer of Useful Knowledge? That’s the Question

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New International Context: Mega-Science, Large Networks and the Division of Scientific Labor

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The Consequences of the New Model for Latin American Research

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Three Cases Illustrating the New International Division of Scientific Labor

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Chagas Disease: Scientific Papers or New Drugs and Vaccines?

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Seagulls and Whales in Patagonia

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Plasma Physics on the “Periphery of the Periphery”

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Conclusions

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References

SECTION D: Higher Education and Foreign Models

Chapter 12: An Emancipatory Look at Comparative Education: A Formative Discipline for Research and Government in Latin America

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Historicizing: What is Making Comparisons Good For?

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The Comparative Method in the Social Sciences

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Traditional Comparative Studies

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Our Emancipatory View of Comparative Education: What Does it Consist of?

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The Global-Universal and the Local-Particular as a Theoretical Comparative Framework

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International Organizations in Latin America and Comparative Studies

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Toward a Transformative Role for Comparative Education in Latin America

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References

Chapter 13: Effects of Structural Adjustment Programs on Funding Policies in Institutions of Higher Education in Kenya

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Contextualizing the Expansion of HigherEducation in Kenya

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Effects of Expansion on Social Sciences in Kenya

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Decentralization of Power and Financing of Universities in Kenya

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Restructuring Higher Education in Kenya

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Conclusion

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References

Chapter 14: The Expansion of Higher Education in Brazil and Its Principal Challenges

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The Educational Issue in Brazil

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The Higher Education System in Brazil

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Policies of Access to Higher Education: The Case of Affirmative Action

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Affirmative Action in Public Institutions

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Affirmative Action in Private Institutions

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Final Considerations

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References

List of Abbreviations

About the Authors

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Hanan Sabea

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Fernanda Beigel

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Syed Farid Alatas

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Hebe Vessuri

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Sujata Patel

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Diego Ezequiel Pereyra

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Natalia Rizzo

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Anabella Abarzúa Cutroni

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Nicolás Gómez Núñez

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Sylvie DidouAupetit

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Adriana Gomez Bonilla

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Fabiana Bekerman

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Víctor Algañaraz

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Ayokunle Olumuyiwa Omobowale

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Pablo Kreimer

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Marcela Mollis

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Susan M. Kilonzo

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Marcia Lima

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of the Second Workshop on Academic Dependency, held at the National University of Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina) in November 2010. It was a productive academic event made possible by the commitment and collaboration of three institutions: the National University of Cuyo, SEPHIS–The Global South Program, and the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO). We also received a grant for Scientific Meetings (RC) from the National Agency for Scientific Research and Technology (ANPCyT). The edition of this book would not have been possible without the support of SEPHIS and UNCuyo University Press (EDIUNC). In particular, we are thankful for the commitment of Claudio Pinheiro and Pilar Peñayrúa.

Preface SEPHIS and a Critical Look at Academic Dependency in Today’s World

Claudio Pinheiro (SEPHIS–The Global South Program)Eloísa Martín (SEPHIS–The Global South Program)

SEPHIS Program proudly welcomes the edition of Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South: Perspectives from the Periphery, organized and edited by Fernanda Beigel and Hanan Sabea.

The main theme adressed is very dear to SEPHIS and closely related to its background, relevance, and milestones over the past 20 years. The initiative that led to the creation of SEPHIS in the early 1990s, which realized that an uneven international scheme for knowledge production and dissemination served as a source of inspiration for specific efforts to support intellectual cohort training and to build ties across peripheral institutions and scholars.

The issue of academic and intellectual dependency has become a classic approach for reflections on global knowledge production. At least since the 1960s, renowned thinkers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have pondered this problem, producing a great number of works, ranging from essays to raise awareness to sophisticated sociological analyses on dependency that have influenced agendas for both intellectuals’ education and operations at institutions involved in knowledge creation in the Global South, known as the Third World back then. These authors tried to explain and reverse the influence of colonialism on research topics, training paths, and funding agendas that restricted the engagement of peripheral countries in global idea production realms. Names like Claude Ake, Paul Houtonji, Amílcar Cabral, Syed Hussein Alatas, Edward Said, Samir Amin, and many others emerged from their university departments, decolonization trenches, and political domains to underscore how the intelligentsia and the structures of knowledge production in the periphery had been compromised by colonialism and its durable effects.

Since then, this concern has gathered momentum, as new scholars have renewed analytical approachesover recent decades, supporting research studies that go beyond ideological considerations of knowledge production in the periphery of global capitalism. Intellectuals currently debating this agenda no longer replicate the dominant geography of the 1960s and 1970s that organized the world around the divide separating a wealthy North from a poor South. Thus, the South is no longer characterized as the site of poverty, but as a semantic realm divested of epistemological and theoretical tools dominating international knowledge production schemes, as noted by Raewyn Connell in Southern Theory. As a result, today’s debates are pushing the boundaries of the Global South.

Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South tackles several of these matters. It is the second publication sponsored by SEPHIS on these topics in the past three years. Both books have been based on the debates and contributions drawn from two events sponsored by this Program. In February 2008, Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff coordinated the seminarCoping with Academic Dependency: How?, organized by SEPHIS in collaboration with the Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), in Patna, India. The papers presented at this seminar were edited in 2010 by Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff (ADRI) and Syed Farid Alatas (National University of Singapore) in a book entitled Academic Dependency in the Social Sciences: Structural Realities and Intellectual Challenges, published by SEPHIS and New Delhi’s Manohar publisher.

In November 2010, SEPHIS organized a second seminar on these topics, coordinated by Fernanda Beigel, under the title Academic Dependency: The Challenge of Constructing Autonomous Social Sciences in the South. The present book compiles the contributions made by participants at Mendoza’s seminar, some of whom had attended Patna’s seminar, showing SEPHIS’ continued support of the debate on material and epistemic conditions of knowledge production in the Global South. These events and publications were intended to debate the approaches that drive inequality in the production of ideas and outline the boundaries of academic dependency. This publication renews the scope of this debate, incorporating classic sociological topics. Its chapters look at issues concerning conceptualization, theoretical debates, internationalization and autonomy, professionalization, and higher education agendas based on Northern models. Hence, they complement and broaden the scope of the debate encompassed by Sinha-Kerkhoff and Alatas’ 2010 publication.

In addition, this publication comes at a time of celebration and new challenges for SEPHIS. In 2014, the Program celebrates its 20-year anniversary in its new home, with SEPHIS being finally transferred to the South, settling down in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Several activities and publications commemorate the Program’s many initiatives to help overcome the gaps and inequalities imposed on international knowledge production that have historically attempted to sentence the Global South to subalternity and silence. For two decades, SEPHIS has encouraged and supported efforts to revamp the debate with theoretical notions surfacing in the South itself, promoting exchanges and links among intellectuals and funding research centers. However, it has been with its initiatives to strengthen youths’ intellectual capacities that SEPHIS has primarily built a more renowned and lasting experience.

The fact that these 20 years are being celebrated in the South itself is another reason for great satisfaction. Moving SEPHIS’ headquarters to the South was a wish long harbored by the Program’s Board, and its materialization is likely to have a significant impact on the debate’s agenda. While Southern countries acknowledge the theoretical debate on divisions in international knowledge production, alternative actions for creating theoretical, epistemological, and scientific practice strongholds seem less visible. It is hard to find specific policies instituted by funding agencies or organized actions by groups of intellectuals to fuel this debate in terms of scientific policies. It is not just about a debate of ideas but about the conditions of ideas’ production, asSouthern countries have historically depended more on public funding for knowledge creation. When peripheral States (by means of their research funding agencies) do not recognize the need to think locally, they end up irreversibly curtailing the possibility of considering actual alternatives to current schemes. As, over these past 20 years, SEPHIS has contributed to a more equitable knowledge production structure, we hope that now, settled in the geographic and epistemological South, it consolidates as a more favorable setting and an active agent for the creation of agendas and funding policies from and for the Global South. The debatesfeatured in Academic Dependency and Professionalization in the South certainly bring new hope for the future of SEPHIS’ policies and the continuity of its projects.

Introduction

Hanan Sabea and Fernanda Beigel

The notion of academic dependency refers to the unequal structure of production and circulation of knowledge, historically built into the international scientific system. For decades it has been a recurring concern for peripheral academic communities and an issue of growing interest for mainstream institutions and inter-governmental agencies. The dependency focus arose in the 1960s as a theoretical problem, with the intention of re-diagnosing underdevelopment within collective and interdisciplinary reflections. Dependency was outlined as an historical situation, occurring under certain national and international conditions, which were conceived of as the result of the global structure of underdevelopment. It was not only seen as an external imposition, but mainly as a relationship between industrialized and peripheral countries. Dependentists contributed significantly to re-thinking the concept of underdevelopment and enriched the structural-historical method (Cardoso and Faletto, 1969; Frank, 1967; Furtado, 1975; Quijano, 1970; Dos Santos, 1968; Sunkel, 1970).

The historical, cultural, and political-economic specificity of Latin America as a space differentiated from the dominant capitalist center heightened dependentists’ awareness of the dominance of foreign theoretical models and about the need to think autonomously. They thus contributed to a regional process of developing scientificparadigms forged at the crossroads between a local variant of Structuralism (Estructuralismo Cepalino), Marxism, and indigenous colonial studies. In this context, cultural imperialism and euro-centrism emerged as critical concepts delineating persistent problems for the social sciences in the Third World, and several scholars offered salient contributions to such debates (Amín, 1989; Fanon, 1974; Mattelart and Dorfman, 1972; Said, 1993; among others). However, the dependentists’ works were mainly published in Spanish and remained marginal, as a result of the military dictatorships in South America and the dismantling of the institutional setting in which this intellectual current emerged (Beigel, 2010a).

Recently, Aníbal Quijano made a major contribution, reflecting on the limits of the categories of the nation and class, which were key foci that prevailed in the 1960s. According to him, economic dependency, class inequality, and racialization of subaltern groups are the result of a long-lasting structure of domination: namely the “coloniality of power” as he phrased it (Quijano, 2000). Such conceptualizations traveled across the periphery, shaping and becoming part of ongoing intellectual and political conversations with other Latin American scholars (e.g. Dussel, 2000; Escobar, 2007; Mignolo 2000), in Africa (e.g. Bissell, 2007; Cooper, 2002; Mamdani, 1996; Mbembe, 2000), the Middle East (e.g. Bilgin, 2004) and Asia (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2000; Dirlik, 2004; Patel, 2004; Sinha, 1997). Such dialogues and engagements fostered important debates about the categories of the universal and the particular, the national and the international.

For some time now, the nature and scope of international/universal social sciences has been debated, and a consensus has not yet been reached. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discussed the existence of universal concepts and ideas. According to him, a set of categories and theories can be imposed globally—hiding the fact that they reflect local conditions and contexts such as those of the United States or France (see also Nugent, 2010, who traces forms and mechanisms of the “domestication” of social science knowledge). These mechanisms are found very often in the circulation of academic novelties, in which case the “imperialism of the universal” is reinforced (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 154). The “imperialism of the universal” translates to anthropological theorizing and research in what Arjun Appadurai (1988) referred to as gate keeping concepts, ideas and themes “that become metonymic prisons for particular places (1988, p. 40). To elaborate his argument, Appadurai turns to the historical and spatial construction of the concept of native in Africa, hierarchy and caste in India, and honor and shame in the Middle East.

Pursuing a similar critique of imperial constructions of spaces and peoples, Lila Abu Lughod, informed by the work of Edward Said, asks in the case of the study of the Arab Middle East “why is theorizing distributed into those particular zones? … and what limits, exclusions and silences does this distribution entail?” (1989, p. 268). In this sense, questions of who writes about whom, how concepts are translated, how languages are forced in order to reach others, and whose terms define the discourse, analysis and conceptual frameworks deployed remain critical in the pursuit of social science in the case of the Middle East, and we can argue, by extension, in the spatial configuration of other places as well (see also Appadurai, 1986; Asad, 1986; Mitchell, 2003).

Since the Gulbenkian Report, Wallerstein has fostered the “unthinking” of social sciences in order to overcome the mandates of nineteenth-century European paradigms (Wallerstein, 2003; see also Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s 1991 analysis of anthropology, its development and strategies for rethinking its relationship to the very project of the West, and Escobar’s 2007 project of “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise”). Contemporary globalization has revived such debates and has laid out the challenge of constructing a sociology that can be both international and contain non-dominant universals (Patel, 2010). Problematizing space and locality has been critical in rethinking not only the universalizing practices of Eurocentric (and colonial) social science. Equally important and relevant to arguments about dependency is the construct of indigenous (see Chapters 2, 3 and 8 of this book). As Suman Seth (2000, p. 378) reminds us, “locality is socially and historically produced in and through a dynamic interaction. The local is not a space where indigenous sensibilities reside in any simple sense.” Seth (2000) further argued:

Anthropologists (in particular) have evinced skepticism towards the very idea of an authentic, systemic and autonomous “indigenous knowledge” as something to be opposed to a singular “scientific knowledge.” “Local knowledge” cannot be simplistically equated with “indigenous knowledge…”We need to pay attention to the ways in which (techno)-scientific knowledge and its way of ordering the world may be both implicated and imbricated in the very indigenous epistemologies to which it is commonly juxtaposed. (p. 378)

Such paradoxes of social science knowledge production can be exemplified by a detour to the Middle East, by briefly engaging the events of 2011 and how they become objects of knowledge and interpretation. The tension and trouble with facile dichotomies as well as the effects of universalizing categories was thus most glaringly exemplified in the recent attempts to name and analyze the revolutions in the Middle East since January 2011. From referencing the East European model as taxonomic equivalent, to an adamant and arrogant insistence on the inevitable path of transformation to and signification of liberal democracy, revolutionary processes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain were already scripted within and along lines defined by an Anglo-Saxon narrative. Despite the evident limits of many such analyses, the analytic lens has either remained confined to a universalizing narrative of transformation, or was simplistically juxtaposed to the “national” (read: local) variant and its “culturalist” logic.

The range of taxonomies deployed varied: revolution vs. uprising, Arab Spring, transitional period to democracy, and the long, convoluted debate about coup or mass revolution for the events of June 30, 2013. Dispersed in between were assertions of the inherent autocratic nature of peoples and rulers in the region, the immaturity (or even improbability) of democracy, and the impossibility of following any other path to freedom and liberty that questions (or reveals the limits of) the very foundational premise of liberal democracy, namely the ballot box and procedural elections. This brief example of the revolutionary processes in the Arab World (also named the Middle East or Middle East and North Africa) cannot but expose the ceaseless quest to frame, name and script the path of transformation from an already given and familiar vantage point. In the same vein, and as we discuss further below, what questions to ask, how categories are deployed, and how rules of the game are defined and reproduced represent yet different angles along which the production of social science knowledge has been configured.

.I. The Research Field and Recent Contributions

Critical social studies of science have a long history and emerged in the North and in the South.There was heightened interest in the mid-twentieth century, when science (and especially social science) became embroiled in the cold war. There is no shortage of studies on the relation between scientific research and foreign aid, international publishing and material resources, uneven distribution of academic prestige among disciplines and institutions, or dissimilar research capacities and heteronomous academic mobility. As a research field, currently academic dependency is intellectually informed by debates and critiques from the social studies of science, critical epistemology and comparative studies of higher education. It encompasses the production and circulation of knowledge as institutional, individual and collective processes, mutually related, which have produced different paths to academia-building. In the periphery, these combinations are the historical result of national and regional responses to internationalization—particularly given the diverse roles played by the state in scientific development and higher education.

Scholars who engage academic dependency as a research problematic focus on processes by which domination is embedded within knowledge production. These studies critically converge with dependency analysis and Latin American structuralism—two traditions originally concerned with economics and politics. In the second half of the 1970s, pioneer works by Edward Shils and Philip Altbach attested to specific factors shaping subordination within the academic field. Gareau (1988) published an important work arguing that Western-forged social sciences built their “truths” with only marginal input from the Third World, a fact that raised serious questions about objectivity. His analysis of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences showed that 98.1% of the authors were affiliated to US universities, or secondarily, to European universities, mainly in the UK, France, and Germany.

Recent studies show that “universal standards” for social research and “good theory” have been constituted and legitimized by the “international” system started of publications by Eugene Garfield in the 1950s. For many decades, the Science Citation Index’s rankings and impact factor have influenced US and European journals’ editorial decisions. Academic prestige was progressively concentrated in top ranked journals and research institutions which helped establish a set of international hierarchies, which increasingly separated research in more prestigious academic centers from marginal knowledge produced and published outside this pool (Beigel, 2013a). Within universities as sites of knowledge production, “a system of measure” as the Edu-factory Collective (2011) refers to it, comprises the increasingly elaborate techniques that the private and public bodies managing universities introduce to attempt to quantify the quality, impact and value of their employees’ work [read: faculty and scholars] (2011, p. 3).

Elements such as university and journal rankings have consolidated these hierarchies and these inequalities in the international circulation of ideas. The 2012 Times’ Higher Education World University Ranking placed no Latin American University in the top 100 and only four made it into the 400 world-wide listed universities (Bernasconi, 2013, p. 1). Challenging the results, a group of University leaders who met in Mexico in 2012 argued that the rankings “are biased and unfair to the region and that Latin American universities are essentially different from the concept of a university implied in the rankings,” the latter derived from standards defined by Anglo-Saxon universities (2013, p. 1). Various forms of resistance to these rankings by academic capitalism can be found throughout the South and North.1 Moreover, the rankings of many if not most aspects of socio-cultural life and experiences proliferate, such as world values in the World Value Surveys, development and governance indices (in the World Human Development Reports and the Mo Ibrahim Good Governance index), freedom and democracy standards, gender equality or measures of gender violence, and the Global Competitiveness Index published by the World Economic Forum. Such indices, measures and maps, though embedded seemingly in social science methodologies, have become an inseparable from the geopolitical management of global order.

The World Social Science Report (UNESCO, 2010) showed that unevenness in institutional settings, translation capacities, and material resources are powerful determinants in academic life. Collaborative research is still dominated by Northern partnerships, with a minimal share of joint South-South articles (2010, p. 146). Heilbron has shown that symbolic goods produced by central academies—and written in English—have a dramatically broader international circulation than those produced in dominated languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian). The latter’s “export” rates are very low or even zero, as they have minimum access to the more prestigious journals published by established research centers. Despite the growth in scientific production in many peripheral countries, Latin America, Asia and Africa currently have a minimum share of the articles indexed by ISI–Thomson Reuters or Scopus. As a result, academic autonomy has become a complex and uphill enterprise for peripheral social sciences, while it is simply taken for granted in American or French Sociology (Beigel, 2014).

In the field of studies on academic dependency, the very concept of autonomy has been thoroughly discussed in light of empirical studies that have clearly shown the development of science in the periphery. Meanwhile, for some, knowledge in the periphery is the result of imitation and the “captive mind” (see Chapter 1), others have demonstrated that a community on the periphery can reduce foreign theoretical imports and increase local production of concepts or methods. It is far more difficult to increase the international circulation of this knowledge. Also significant is the case of “peripheral centers” that have reached dominant positions within Southern regions, but remain subordinate within the world academic system (Beigel, 2010). The argument is equally relevant to disciplines such as anthropology, for instance: though peripheral regions have for years served as key sites for ethnographic research, they remain on the margins in publishing domains and circuits of knowledge production and circulation.

The tensions between globalization and internationalization, and the alternatives for non-dominant social sciences have been also explored (Garretón et al., 2005; Kuhn and Weidemann, 2010; Patel, 2010). Given that internationalization contains the idea of nations as homogeneous spaces, it is sometimes considered a phenomenon of the past that has been superseded by a truly global. Using the term in this book, therefore, stresses the fact that national spaces are still a valid unit of analysis to understand much of the current education, research, and funding in the social sciences. Of course it is not the only unit of analysis, nor is it adequate to use only this one. As Sassen (2010) has argued, the global is partly built inside the national.

.The Nationalist Approach and the Perspective from the Periphery

Peripheral scientific communities have been often misrepresented as lacking in “autonomy” on account of their location in social spaces besieged by powerful exogenous forces—state interventions, politicization, and/or the “influence” of foreign models. This suspicion has been coined not only by the traditional academic centers that have historically established the “universal” objectivity criteria, but also by peripheries themselves, as they chased the illusion of producing “purely” autonomous scientific knowledge, crafted as the image of the myth built by the former (Beigel, 2013b). A nativist perspective rounded out this sort of methodological nationalism, bestowing on this knowledge also an original national “essence.”

Academic dependency studies from the periphery face ample challenges that underlie these suspicions that there is “original” knowledge abroad (emerging in “pure” knowledge production fields and centers untainted by external interferences) while local knowledge is considered subordinated to the former by nature. Such a conviction perpetuates the inclination to measure so-called peripheral knowledge production through ideal standards—embodied by and in American and French models.

Observing the intersections of the academic field with other social spaces casts some doubts on what was traditionally construed as “internal” dynamics and so-called “exogenous” forces. Moreover, determining local professionalization drivers suggests addressing the singular features of “internationalization” at the national and regional levels. Thus, the use of Bourdieu’s concept of academic “field” is productive if built through an ongoing interaction between empirical observations and historical-structural analyses. Academic “autonomy” serves, therefore, more as a research question than triggering a blind search for adjustments/maladjustments with a measuring stick devised in other latitudes. Indeed, academic dependency is built in the context of complex and mobile historical boundaries between academia and the broader field of power, given the understanding that advances and backwardness mark peripheral professionalization processes.

From the perspective of the periphery, academic dependency cannot be understood merely as a vertical bond that ties active producers and passive reproducers. Even though knowledge produced in peripheral communities has low rates of circulation within international academic systems, this does not imply that their production is—or always has been—the result of a massive import of foreign concepts and resources. For instance, by the 1960s, Latin American social sciences had reached high standards of institutional development and intellectual autonomy. A vigorous sub-regional circuit was created and large public university systems were consolidated—along with what has been constituted as “peripheral centers,” such as Brazil, México, Argentina and Chile. In this phase of the history of social sciences in this region, local academic traditions emerged that become continually stronger (Beigel, 2010).

Though it has been recognized that there is variation within the North (as there is in the South), the problems faced by social scientists in peripheral communities are generally of a different nature than those faced in mainstream academies. Therefore, multiple situations of academic dependency can be empirically determined and different situations of autonomy can be distinguished.

.II. Disciplining the Social Sciences: Questions of Value and Conversions in the South

In her 2009 article “Critique, Dissent and Disciplinarity,” Butler (2009) wrote:

… what should be preserved as a value of the university is precisely that operation of critique that asks by what right and through which means certain doxa become accepted as necessary and right and by what right and through what means certain government commands or, indeed, policies, are accepted as the pre-critical doxa of the university. (p. 738)

In what we call “disciplining the social sciences” we start with Butler to underline, from the outset, where we would like to end up, namely the centrality of critique and critical knowledge to the social and human sciences, in general, and the University in particular as a key site and node in this process. In fact, we argue, although the university does not own a monopoly on the production of knowledge, it remains a crucial site in such processes. Additionally, and as Don Mitchell (2209) reminds us:

For those of us interested in struggling for a more just world, a world in which the US military might and US imperialism are things of the past, then our target cannot—or cannot only—be specific programs … our target must also—and especially—be the university itself. We need to raise the question not of what the nationalist university, or the university of excellence was, but what the university of justice could and should be. (p. 2)

The struggle for justice cannot be separated from the struggle against dependent relationships that have shaped the University and therefor the production of social science knowledge, whether the dependency was on the imperial Anglo-Saxon matrix, the nationalist state, or the market. Indeed how dependency relations have been reproduced, albeit with different inflections, under contemporary politico-economic and social systems, comprise a critical node and a more recent manifestation in long histories of domination. Our focus in this section concerns contemporary politics and how they have shaped dependency relationships and structures. We contend that this project of critique and critical knowledge, which is of primary urgency in the context of a neo-liberalizing academy, locates the intellectual in the domain of the political. In other words, the inseparability of the intellectual and the political, as Amina Mama (2000) reminds us, or what Aníbal Quijano (2002) called for, the link between critical imagination, forms of knowledge production, and social action.

It thus squarely situates the University and critical knowledge in relationship to the larger social and political context, which they inhabit, and to structures, relationships, and forms of dependency that we have engaged. A number of questions become urgent in this regard and at present: have the social sciences left the domain of the political and have they stopped being critical? Critical of what, in what terms, and in what ways? Have the social sciences abandoned the legacy of colonialism, or has Empire, as Hardt and Negri detail in their recent works, absorbed them? How can we locate contemporary struggles against current forms of dependency on states, markets, capitalism and imperialism?

We attempt to engage three key terms—values, and conversions—that we argue are facetsthat have marked the social sciences for at least the last two decades. By “disciplining the social sciences,” we underscore yet another face of dependency whereby social science knowledge is not only part of the technology of governance (whether of the colonial or post-colonial states), but itself has been become an object thereof. Like “the natives” under Lugard’s project of indirect rule in Africa, the social sciences are “disciplined” and made to be “put in their place.” In addition, the “place” designed is carved out within a certain economy whose logic is defined by market triumphalism under the larger rubric of neoliberal order, or what Don Mitchell has referred to as the “growing cult of entrepreneurship” (2009, p. 2).

The cult of entrepreneurialism, which changes us as social subjects, also changes the University: it gives the university a new raison d’etre: building skills and inculcating a highly constricted “philosophy of life.” The university as a nation-building institution returns, but this time as an even more hideous, imperialist monster: it sets out to remake the world—and us—in the image of exploitative American entrepreneurial capitalism, the needs and desires of all those not interested in this philosophy of life be damned. (2009, p. 3).

The reference to Lugard and the natives in their confined place is not accidental, nor figurative; rather it underlies what Quijano has called the coloniality of power that marks our political present. Moreover, nowhere is this coloniality of power as a relationship of domination and difference more pronounced than in the production of social science knowledge in the periphery. In the name of societal impact, policy outcomes, and partnerships with science, government, business and industry, the social sciences are being disciplined in the service of state and market under the overarching umbrella of global governance. To remain part of an order whose terms appear to be neutral, natural, and seemingly already enshrined, the social sciences—particularly in the periphery—are driven to convert their practices and norms (i.e. tools, concepts, approaches, and the nature of critiques). At the same time, those who would like to condemn it to a space of “ornamental art or instrumental tool for social engineering,” as the authors of the Arab World section of UNESCO 2010 Social Science World Report have concluded, have appropriated their analytical constructs and methodological tools.

We will see the case of the Arab World: How different is it from the region known as MENA (Middle East and North Africa)? How has it been packaged as a region among many and how has social science knowledge production contributed to these processes of framing and delineating a geopolitical space, whose names have historically shifted, reflecting not only the positioning of places and peoples in larger global processes, but also how peoples have engaged what Mignolo has called “global designs.”

The Arab World has become of particular global interest as of recently, particularly in the wake of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, which have swept the region. Ironically, only a year earlier the picture looked different. As a location or a region, it was marked and globally ranked by its “deficits.” According to the 2010 Arab Human Development Report (AHDR 2010), MENA is a region of deficit, a deficit of knowledge, a deficit of freedom, and a deficit of so-called empowerment. However, what does deficit mean and from where does this term originate? What are the effects of initiatives that have been taking place to change these structures and address the violence of neo-liberalization? What is this global ranking about and who produces it? What in fact is MENA? What are its limits and how does it relate to regional designations that were once in circulation, such as Arab World and Middle East?

We would like thus to emphasize the contingent and historically specific nature of this “regional” packaging, as well as the political parameters that have shaped its coming into being and circulation. It is by placing this category MENA in dialogue and conversation with other spaces that the historical links, points of disjuncture, connections, and divergences come to the fore. Hence this demonstrates larger processes at work which are part of shaping our political present, much as they have the past. Moreover, local matters, not in the simple or facile geographical sense, but as a matrix of socio-political and historical process of engagement, or what Mignolo implied by addressing the geopolitics of knowledge.

More pertinent still, is how short-sighted, limited and limiting these assertions sound in retrospect. Only a few months later, starting in January 2011, this same region with a deficit in freedom and empowerment witnessed one of the most dramatic revolutionary events, which overthrew some of the most entrenched dictators in the region, if not the world! But how can social science models err to such an extent? How did they not only fail to anticipate what has been brewing, or at least hint at the multitude of social struggles that have engulfed cities, towns and villages for at least a decade? What belies the certainty with which such statements and analyses can be made? If anything, as John Law (2004) reminds us:

The world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we’re going to have to give up on some of the simplicities. But one thing is sure: if we want to think about the messes of reality at all then we’re going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practice, to relate and to knowledge in new ways (p. 3).

How have the social sciences in and about MENA thought, practiced, related to and come to know the social world it attempted to study and analyze?

.A Story of a Story: Histories of Social Science Production and Circulation in MENA

The story of the social sciences in what is now called MENA could have many beginnings, depending on which analytics one adopts. One can convincingly trace it to the early twentieth century, a time defined by the colonial project and its technologies of governance, in which key roles were played by the social sciences, particularly anthropology, political economy as instituted within law, and sociology. In fact, what is currently Cairo University, then Fouad University, witnessed the inflow of key figures in the field, like Evans-Pritchard who taught and trained certain generations of Egyptians in the social sciences in the 1940s and 1950s (see Kassab 2013: 27–28). Yet this is but one edge of the story upon a story as David Cohen would remind us in his Combing of History. A nationalist project since the 1920s populated by figures like Tahtawy, Afghani, Abdou and their likes, was already well underway, engaged in defining the scope, subject matter, and parameters of an intellectual project that debated the meanings of modernity, nation and tradition. A vibrant student movement shared in critical reflections on the context of the production and circulation of their knowledge, which at that time, called for decolonization not only of the polity but also intellect. Yet another edge to the story takes us back to the ninth century, at Al-Karaouine University in Fez, Morocco, which was established by a wealthy philanthropist woman, Fatima El-Fihria and became a beacon of knowledge production and circulation. A century later, Al-Azhar University in Cairo appeared on the map. For many, fourteenth-century Morocco would then be invoked; Ibn Khaldun can be considered the father of sociology, much before the field was institutionalized in Europe in the nineteenth century. These snippets of stories highlight two things. On the one hand, the longer histories of critical social science knowledge production in the region, particularly in Egypt, Morocco, and Lebanon. These three locales would serve for a long time as the “gate keepers” of knowledge production and circulation in what later came to be known as MENA, demarcating the three geographies that came to comprise it, namely the Maghreb, the Levant, and Egypt and its surroundings. They not only spoke for the region, they also demarcated what was speakable. Second, the orbits and circuits of knowledge with which the three interfaced demonstrate the blurred and ambiguous bounds, which constitute “regions” such as MENA, Africa, or Asia. Where does one stop and does the other start, who claims what and for whom does it matter?

In the wake of World War II, the birth of a new project of governance by nascent independent nations ushered in a different time and set of stories about social science production in the region. Nation-building, modernization, and social engineering were high on state agendas, and by extension the University was a key site in the production of “relevant knowledge for development.” Inspired by the gains of decolonization and dependency, the University became a key knowledge production site in, about, and for society, under the auspices of the state.

Yet here again the story is more complicated, since during the 1960s and 70s we witness serious calls for “indigenization of social science”, and to end intellectual imperialism that had come to define the production of histories of an earlier era. Edward Said’s Orientalism, Talal Asaad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, and Saad Ibrahim’s Indigenous Social Science, are but few examples of the kinds of critiques that were produced and circulated far beyond the region. A similar project on knowledge production in Africa was heralded by figures such as Archie Mafeje, Claude Ake, and Magubane. Indeed, many of these scholars were not confined “to a place”; rather their productions and engagements were part of an economy of movement and circulation that defied the spatial statist-nationalist logic that compartmentalizes and segments knowledge production and more seriously, the kinds of circulations that constitute libraries and texts for reproduction of the social science project.

The national-statist regulation of social science—which also likens the story of MENA to other regions in the periphery—took more aggressive measures at the same time, most crystallized in the reign that the state had over the University and the orientation of social science toward an instrumentalist approach in the service of a developmentalist agenda. Additionally, the economic base of the sites of knowledge production (mainly national universities) and the organization of production itself (division of labor, hierarchies, venues for circulation) became more dependent on the state as the ultimate provider, protector, and arbitrator. Funds, agendas, positions, and labor markets were tied to the machinery of state institutions, and the public universities themselves were reconstituted as part of the public inseparable from the state. Opposition and protest, which did not vanish, were aggressively attacked, called a threat to the national good, or a threat from religious fundamentalism, or a threat to political stability that cannot be risked at the times of war. A crackdown on student movements in 1971­–1972 was but one moment during which the brutal face of the state was rendered crystal clear (see Abdalla, 1985). What happened to students was extended to intellectuals, who were harassed, detained, and exiled. Their spaces of sociation (like downtown cafes), which were primary sites of invigorating debate and critical imagination, were placed under siege.

The 1980s, with the shift toward so-called peace, the free market, civil society and democratization saw the mushrooming of other spaces of social science production, namely NGOs that started competing with the academy and the university as key sites in knowledge production. A particular version of developmentalism became entrenched in the process, along with it the espousal of the need for “professionalization” of social science, namely the development of a toolkit of approaches, methods, and concepts that would serve the expanding NGO sector. At the same time, the disconnecting between state and university started to take shape, with the withdrawal of the former from funding its infrastructure or providing outlets for its productions. Instead, international donors, corporations and NGOs became the key players in the field who set the terms of the agenda and the tools with which it was instrumentalized. A third player appeared on the scene, namely private universities that are mainly geared toward market and industry (science and technology, IT, and business and commerce). Very rarely do the social sciences have space within the social fields of the latter. The 1990s ushered in the final designs of the map of the present, with global agendas, international institutions, corporate cultures more aggressively and blatantly reworking the geographies of value and setting the terms of conversions of the social sciences. Although the revolutionary processes since 2011 have promised massive structural transformations, which included in no uncertain terms forms of knowledge production along autonomous lines, the picture, as Al-Awady (2013) details, remains plagued by patterns whose contours were established years before. As the head of the Egyptian Student Union argued,

Nothing has changed. Things have gone from bad to worse. It used to be that we talked about problems in education, research, curricula, and of graduates not fitting the needs of the job market… We still have the same problems but now add to those that we have a lack of security in our universities. (Al-Awady, 2013, p. 5).

The historical, cultural and social specificity of MENA notwithstanding, the parameters of the story are not that much different from the production of social science knowledge in other geopolities of the world, as we detailed earlier. Indeed the histories, though at some level unique and particular, are structurally not at odds with others experienced in Africa, Asia or Latin America. The story of stories about MENA outlined above highlights the long histories of structural relations of dependency and domination, and equally important struggle and resistance that has shaped the very making of the Global South as a category and a geopolitical space. Contemporary predicaments are equally relevant across the span of the south, connecting its disparate places into a system of value in social science production whose terms are inseparable from global divisions of labor. Indeed, as Dokuzovic and Freudmann (2011) contend,

The commodification and homogenization of knowledge and education are grounded in a long history of international structural “development” policy that was conceived and installed by the US in order to ensure its position as the center, dominating and exploiting its peripheries. (p. 23)

Although experiences of the so-called corporate university and the positioning of the social sciences therein seem to have been normalized into “familiar” experience, in the South they have entailed a more aggressive entrenchment of dependency on capitalism and imperialism. As Thornton contends, the university as a key site in the production of knowledge has been assigned the functional role “to serve the state through the market” (2004, p. 12). In addition, lest we fail to recognize it, was the unabating, sporadic, yet intensive resistance against such processes. In place of nation and development, the most recent iteration of dependency is legitimized in the name of excellence, best practices exported from Northern academe, a technocratic curriculum, and emphasis on skills, market employability and competition (see Ross, 2010; Thornton, 2004). Additionally, “the casualization of the academic work force is the most obvious—arguably, the loss of professional job security has occurred at a rate faster than in any other occupational sector. The polarization in salaries is another example of mercantilization” (Ross, 2010, p. 1). An increase in administrative posts to manage the academic workforce as well as to cater to and regulate the student body have entailed a deepening of the financial crises of universities, the endless budget cuts for research, the increasing weight given to strategic reports and planning, which have all been symptoms signifying the emergence of the corporate model. However, it is also worth noting, as Ross (2010, p. 2) has argued, the patterns we are witnessing, particularly the thickening of bureaucracy, cannot but point to a governmental rather than a corporate model along which universities have been reconstituted (see also Ginsberg, 2011).

But what about the social sciences’ positioning within such domains? As we have argued above, and as illustrated in more than one example in the papers to follow, social sciences—like the humanities—have been relegated to the margins of the margins. This marginalization has taken several forms: ranging from the elevated value of techno-sciences and their monopoly over realms, terms and forms of knowledge production, to servicing other domains and disciplines within the world of universities and the technocratic orientation of the curriculum, to being forced to collaborate with science, business and management to survive for a place within the academic world (see Bhan 2013; Biagioli, 2009; Ross, 2010; Thornton, 2004). A number of buzzwords have accompanied this process, which we call value conversion, such as collaboration, consultancies, and partnerships. Much of this consulting work raises questions on the nature of multi-disciplinary cross-fertilization, the authors’ terms of reference, and the effects’ forms andduration. In this regard, Biagioli (2009) argues:

If these new research configurations hardly fit the traditional taxonomy of disciplines, they also challenge the organization of academic spaces and the traditional divide between academe and business, thus showing that the definitions of a “site” of knowledge production have become as ephemeral as that of a discipline. (p. 819)

The effects of this collaboration have produced contradictory trajectories for so-called traditional disciplines, whose boundaries and ethos were defined long ago in the nineteenth century. While boundaries and practices of research and knowledge production have been rendered malleable to accommodate and reflect the need for dialogue and collective practice, practitioners operating within traditional disciplines have simultaneously fortified their boundaries in relation to encroachments by so-called post-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary programs and centers of knowledge. The political economic underpinning of this process and the struggles waged within it leave space for re-engaging Butler’s questions that we raised at the beginning of this section: “by what right and through which means certain doxa become accepted as necessary and right.” Given the inequities of such collaborative processes and relationships, one wonders what the terms were, and who the authors were that were involved in such collaborations and partnerships, and what kinds of knowledge were being produced. “Hence, within the contemporary context, ‘truth’ is likely to be tempered by the instrumentalism of the market; a body of autonomous knowledge is impossible” (Thornton, 2004, p. 9).

We again draw on MENA as an instance to exemplify these processes of collaboration and partnerships. The region was “re-discovered” as a laboratory for research after the onset of the revolutionary processes of January 2011. Think tanks, northern universities, and scholars flocked to the region for partnerships with scholars in the South (read: natives of a place). Research themes were the familiar basket of democratization, empowerment, participation, and last but not least, violence against women and the prospects of Islamic governance and democracy. Federal or EU funding was made contingent on “being inclusive”, pushing many scholars in the north to seek “eye witness” accounts of scholars in the South. Yet what were most disturbing were the terms of the collaboration and partnerships. Visits that lasted a couple of weeks, maximum, were framed with already known wisdom about the region and a certain image of its potentials for “democracy.” Re-configured within familiar paradigms posed by the Anglo-Saxon experience as the only path to change, gatekeeping concepts, research methodologies, and questions were packaged with little room to attempt to comprehend processes as messy as the revolutionary processes that have engulfed—and continue as we write—the region and its people. Indeed as Mona Abaza once argued, what we have experienced within the academe since January 2011 are forms of “academic tourism” that call into question the parameters along which knowledge is produced (2011, p.1). At the same time, the certainty and speed with which methodological toolkits (surveys, structured questions, and focus groups) were put in place, cannot but remind us of John Law’s (2004) critiques of the long-lasting monopoly on knowledge paradigms and how we hope to understand, relate and interpret the social worlds we inhabit.