Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South 1925495760, 9781925495768

Table of contents :
Other Books by the Authors
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
About the Authors
Introduction
1 Knowledge-Making: The Production of Knowledge
2 The New Domains of Knowledge
3 Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds
4 Publication Patterns in the New Domains
5 Circulating Knowledge
6 Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge
7 Southern Tier, Global Economy and Knowledge Workers
Appendix: The Method for the Study
Acknowledgments
References
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER MAKING NEW SCIENCES IN THE SOUTH FRAN COLLYER, RAEWYN CONNELL, JOÃO MAIA AND ROBERT MORRELL

Knowledge and Global Power Making New Sciences in the South Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell

Knowledge and Global Power: Making New Sciences in the South © Copyright 2019 Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act 1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher. Monash University Publishing Matheson Library and Information Services Building 40 Exhibition Walk Monash University Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia www.publishing.monash.edu Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best traditions of humane and enlightened thought. Monash University Publishing titles pass through a rigorous process of independent peer review. ISBN: 9781925495768 (pb) ISBN: 9781925495775 (pdf ) ISBN: 9781925495782 (epub) www.publishing.monash.edu/books/kgp-9781925495768.html Series: Southern Theory Design: Les Thomas Cover image: Boab Tree, Kimberly, Australia. By kkaplin, Shutterstock ID 15021199. A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

Other Books by the Authors Also by Fran Collyer The Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (editor). Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, UK. 2015. Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine: America, Britain and Australia Compared. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, UK. 2012. So We Write Star Authors: Another Anthology of the Society of Women Writers South Australia (editor). The Society of Women Writers South Australia. 2016. Public Enterprise Divestment: Australian Case Studies (with Wettenhall and McMaster). Pacific Institute of Management and Development and University of the South Pacific Press. 2001. Technology Strategies in Australian Industry (with Johnston, ScottKemmis, Darling, Roessner and Currie). The Centre for Technology and Social Change, The University of Wollongong, AGP: Canberra. 1990. Also by Raewyn Connell Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Polity Press: Cambridge. 2007. Masculinities. University of California Press: Berkeley. 1995. Making The Difference: Schools, Families and Social Division (with Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett). Allen and Unwin: Sydney. 1982. Ruling Class, Ruling Culture. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. 1977. Also by João Maia A Terra Como Invenção: O Espaço No Pensamento Social Brasileiro (author). Estado, Território e Imaginação Espacial: O Caso da Fundação Brasil Central. and selected papers in English ‘History of sociology and the quest for intellectual autonomy in the global south: The cases of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and Syed Hussein Alatas’, Current Sociology, 2014, 62(7): 1097–1115. ‘Space, social theory and peripheral imagination: Brazilian intellectual history and de-colonial debates’, International Sociology, 2011, 26: 392–407.

Also by Robert Morrell Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds (editor with Cooper). James Currey: Oxford. 2014. Books and Babies: Pregnancy and Parenthood in South African Schools (editor with Bhana and Shefer). HSRC Press: Cape Town. 2012. Towards Gender Equality? South African Schools during the HIV/AIDS Epidemic (with Epstein, Unterhalter, Bhana and Moletsane). University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: Pietermaritzburg. 2009. Baba: Men and Fatherhood in South Africa (editor with Richter). HSRC Press: Cape Town. 2006. African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late 19th Century to the Present (editor with Ouzgane). Palgrave / University of KwaZulu-Natal Press: New York, Pietermaritzburg. 2005. From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920. UNISA Press: Pretoria. 2001. Changing Men in Southern Africa (editor). University of Natal Press / Zed Books: Pietermaritzburg/London. 2001. Political Economy and Identities in Kwazulu-Natal: Historical and Social Perspectives (editor) Indicator Press: Durban. 1996. White But Poor. Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 (editor) UNISA Press: Pretoria. 1992.

Contents Other Books by the Authors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

List of Figures and Tables. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . x

About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv 1

Knowledge-Making: The Production of Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

3

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds . . . . . . . . . . 54

2 4 5 6 7

The New Domains of Knowledge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Publication Patterns in the New Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Circulating Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120

Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge. . . . . . . . . 146 Southern Tier, Global Economy and Knowledge Workers. . . . . . 168

Appendix: The Method for the Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205

Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

List of Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 1: Number of papers 1980–2015, three knowledge domains, Web of Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Figure 2: Growth of domains 1985-2015, differentiating between the domains of ‘Gender and Sex’ and ‘Gender’. . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Figure 3: The domain of climate change, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Figure 4: The domain of HIV/AIDS, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Figure 5: The domain of gender, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 Figure 6: Number of climate change papers, selected countries, 1980–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Figure 7: Number of HIV/AIDS papers, selected countries, 1980–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Figure 8: Number of sex and gender papers, selected countries, 1980–2015. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Figure 9: Research funding by country, 2011– 2016. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Figure 10: Sources of funding climate change, 2011–2016. . . . . . . . . . . 115 Figure 11: Sources of funding HIV/AIDS, 2011–2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Figure 12: Sources of funding gender, 2011–2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

List of Figures and Tables

Tables Table 1:

Disciplinary composition of gender and sex domain over time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Table 2:

WoS publication output, 1990 and 2015, ranked by country . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Table 3:

Top ten journals 2013–2015, by quantity of publications in three domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Table 4:

Funding sources by country, 2011–2016 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

ix

Abbreviations A&HCI AAUP

Arts & Humanities Citation Index

American Association of University Presses

ABIA

Interdisciplinary Brazilian Association of AIDS

AIDS

Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome

ABLE AJAR

the Amazon Boundary Layer Experiment

African Journal of AIDS Research

ARC

Australian Research Council

CAPES

Brazilian federal agency for fostering graduate programmes

ART

CAPRISA

antiretroviral therapy

Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa

Carlos Chagas Foundation Brazilian agency for funding science CAWCR CDC

CEPAL CLAPCS CNPq

CODESRIA COPPE CSIR CSIRO FLACSO GFDL

Centre for Atmospheric Weather and Climate Research

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (USA)

United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (now Latin America and the Caribbean)

Latin American Center for Social Science Research

National Council for Scientic Research

Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa a graduate program in engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (South Africa)

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia) Latin American Social Sciences Institute

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (USA)

Abbreviations

GRID

gay-related immune deficiency

IGBP

International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

HIV

human immunodeficiency virus

IMAGES

International Men and Gender Equality Survey

INPE

Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais [National Institute for Space Research], Brazil

IMF

IPCC

International Monetary Fund

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

MAPS

Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios programme

NASA

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (USA)

NCCARF

National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (Australia)

MDB

NCAR

NGOs NIH

Brazilian Movement for Democracy

National Centre for Atmospheric Research (USA

Non-government organisations

National Institutes of Health (USA)

NRF

National Research Foundation (South Africa)

SSCI

Social Sciences Citation Index

TAC

Treatment Action Campaign (South Africa)

UN

United Nations

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization

SBPC

Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science

SSN SouthSouthNorth UFRJ UNAIDS

UNFCCC UPSO WHO WoS

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change University Press Scholarship Online World Health Organization

Web of Science

xi

About the Authors Associate Professor Fran Collyer is a sociologist at the University of Sydney in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy. She is Senior Editorial Adviser to the Health Sociology Review, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Sociology, a Journal of the British Sociological Association. Her research interests span the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of health and medicine. Research has focused on the history of sociology, the formation of disciplines and institutions, the globalisation of knowledge, the privatisation of healthcare services, the sociology of the healthcare systems and its inequalities. Recent books include Mapping the Sociology of Health and Medicine (2012), for which she won the Stephen Crook Memorial Award for the best Australian monograph 2012–13, and the Palgrave Handbook of Social Theory in Health, Illness and Medicine (2015). More detail: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/sociology_social_policy/staff/profiles/fran.collyer. php Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney, and a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union. Recent books are Gender Reckonings (with James Messerschmidt, Michael Messner and Patricia Yancey Martin 2018), Gender: In World Perspective (with Rebecca Pearse 2015), and Southern Theory (2007). Her work has been translated into nineteen languages. Raewyn has taught at universities in Australia, Canada, Germany and the USA, and is a long-term participant in the labour movement and peace movement. More detail: www.raewynconnell.net. João Maia lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a PhD in Sociology and currently teaches in the School of Social Sciences (CPDOC) at Fundação Getulio Vargas. He has done research on the history of social sciences, Brazilian social thought and sociological theory in the global South. His most recent articles in English are ‘History of sociology and the quest for intellectual autonomy in the global South: the cases of Alberto Guerreiro Ramos and Syed Hussein Alatas’ (Current Sociology 2014) and ‘Space, social theory and peripheral imagination: de-colonial debates and Brazilian intellectual history’ (International Sociology 2011). João also blogs (in Portuguese) about sociology and public life in: avidapublicadasociologia.wordpress.com

About the Authors

Robert Morrell was born and lives in South Africa. He is an historian by training and currently works in Research Development in the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Town. Robert’s major research activity has concentrated on questions of gender in Africa with a specific focus on masculinities in Southern Africa. Among his books are From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal (2001) and (with Debbie Epstein, Elaine Unterhalter, Deevia Bhana and Relebohile Moletsane) Towards Gender Equality (2009). He has edited Changing Men in Southern Africa (2001) and (with Lahoucine Ouzgane) African Masculinities (2005). A new area of his research is in the area of knowledge production. Together with Brenda Cooper, Robert edited Africa-Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds (2014).

xiii

Introduction This book is about knowledge, the making of knowledge, and the politics of knowledge, in a world context. We examine three new fields of knowledge as they have come into exist­ ence—not in the global centres, but in countries of the Southern tier: Brazil, South Africa, and Australia. We address massive problems of inequality in the knowledge economy, and vexed questions of autonomy, creativity, and social relevance in knowledge. We use interviews, field observation, extensive databases, and historical documents to explore these questions. And we believe we have something new to say about them. Globalisation and new technology have impacted the ways that know­ ledge was made, disseminated and consumed. At the push of a button, one can find articles or sources from all over the world. Yet the global know­ ledge economy is still marked by its history. The former imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the rich countries of Europe and North America that we call collectively the global North, are still central in the knowledge economy. In this book we examine how their influence persists. But our focus is on the knowledge work of the system’s periphery, the majority world, the global South. We have embarked on an exploration of how knowledges are produced a long way from the ‘centre’, in the distinctive social and economic settings of post-colonial countries. Philosophical and sociological questions about how knowledge is produced, and whether knowledge-making can be free from social, political and economic interests, are not new. There has been debate over such questions since the sociology of knowledge took shape in the revolutionary 1920s in Germany. The sociology of knowledge has explored the knowledge-making practices of scientists, the privileges of the intellectual classes, and the everyday social construction of reality. But the mainstream discipline was strongly focussed on the global North, and only in some post-colonial regions, including Brazil, India and South-East Asia, did questions of knowledge dependence and autonomy come into focus. More recently, scholarship in the global North too has begun to address the Eurocentric structure of the knowledge economy and the impact of colonialism on scholars and scholarship in the majority world. This is the intellectual context in which we have written our book. We ask some old questions about knowledge-making, knowledge workers, and

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

the production and circulation of knowledge. But we also ask some new ones, especially about North/South relations and how they work out in the fine detail of researchers’ lives, practices, and connections as well as the large-scale patterns of publication and recognition. A crucial feature of our approach was the choice of the domains of knowledge to study. We do not regard the global inequalities in the know­ ledge economy as a fixed structure, but as a dynamic one: brought into exist­ence in the history of empire and colonialism, always changing and now capable of more change. We wanted to examine knowledge-making specifically in new fields. Older domains—say, agronomy or economics— generally have strongly marked boundaries and hierarchies. New domains might be more open to new players and have unresolved boundaries, and in them, questions of dependence might be more in question. Our research design was a kind of natural experiment. The three domains we study are HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies. As well as being historically new fields (though all have older roots, they have come into full existence as research fields only since the 1970s), they all deal with socially and politically important issues. Thus they raise questions directly about research and its context. Further, all are multidisciplinary, with different mixes of the physical and biomedical sciences, the humanities and social sciences. They thus yield information across the spectrum of research-based knowledge. Our team came together in late 2012 when we made the decision to apply for research funding. Raewyn Connell’s book Southern Theory had been published in 2007, emphasising both the creativity of Southern intellectuals and their marginality in world social science. Raewyn had been conducting research on intellectual workers for some time; in this and other projects, she had developed life history interview methods and studies of organisations and labour processes. Robert Morrell had a background of research in history, education, and gender studies. At a practical level he was working for the development of new research workforces, in South Africa and across the continent. João Maia had earlier worked on the history of Brazilian social thought. In the early 2010s, he was working with non-European social theory and post-colonial studies, and reading Southern Theory. He too had an enduring interest in the sociology of intellectuals. Fran Collyer had a long-standing interest in the history of disciplines, and been in search of empirical evidence to support the theory of differential power between Northern and Southern knowledge workers. She had developed a new methodology—context-content analysis—to provide just that. xvi

Introduction

For all the group, therefore, the ‘Global Arenas of Knowledge’ project brought empirical and theoretical interests together. It offered both a systematic approach to the global production of knowledge, and close-focus study of intellectual workers. The team combined skills in historical and sociological, archival and field research; knowledge of several languages, qualitative and quantitative skills. Our locations in three countries of the Southern tier made a multi-site investigation possible, and our knowledge of different institutional cultures has vastly enriched our study. Australia, South Africa and Brazil are all remote from the global metropole, and have relationships with the global North that are decidedly asymmetrical. None is a poor country, and Australia is high-income in world terms; each has a degree of regional economic power. All have welldeveloped educational institutions. Each has a history of colonialism, with on-going issues of inequality, indigenous poverty and racism. There are significant differences between them. Brazil was colonised by the Portuguese and its population shaped by large-scale slave trade from Africa, as well as the survival of indigenous peoples and the arrival of new settlers. Post-colonial governments created a publicly-funded university system in the twentieth century, and a number of free-standing research institutes. South Africa was colonised by the Dutch and by the British who brought indentured labour from India; indigenous peoples including Xhosa and Zulu remain a majority. Since the end of the apartheid era South Africa has had a nationalist, democratically elected government, which has instituted a human rights culture while seeking redress for racial injustices. Universities, the major drivers of research, have been caught up in a national struggle over resources. Effectively, they are receiving less funding and being expected to enrol rapidly increasing numbers of students. Australia, which has a very ancient indigenous culture, was occupied by British settlers. It remains oriented towards Anglo-American culture, though its large migrant intake has become very diverse. Colonial governments began founding universities as early as the 1850s, but they acquired substantial research capacity only in the second half of the twentieth century. Both Australia and South Africa made a strong turn towards neoliberalism in the late twentieth century, and have lost their manufacturing industries; this turn has been more contested in Brazil. However, it is the common ground between them that makes the Southern tier so interesting for studying the production of knowledge. All three countries have considerable research capacity today, in universities and research institutes. The work of these institutions shows the feature xvii

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

we call ‘extraversion’, adopting frameworks and methods that have been developed in the global North. None of these countries has the capacity to dictate global research agendas, and their research workers often struggle for international recognition. On the other hand, each of these countries has been prominent in some fields of research; and each is a major force in its region, attracting students and researchers from neighbouring countries and providing training and research opportunities. The three countries all contribute in substantial ways to scholarly know­ ledge, but with differences that reflect language, history, and current social and economic situations. South Africa, with its disproportionate burden of HIV/AIDS disease, has invested heavily in research in this field; Australia has historically put substantial resources into agricultural and marine sciences; Brazilian scholars have contested anglophone dominance in a variety of fields. Our study does not attempt to assess the contributions of the three countries to all fields of knowledge, as this would be too large a project. Instead we focus on the three domains already mentioned, using these essentially as case studies. Our opening chapter introduces the sociology of knowledge and know­ ledge workers, and argues that this field now needs to be formulated on a world scale. We introduce the concept of the global economy of knowledge, with its internal hierarchies and divisions of labour. We emphasise that this economy is dynamic, and trace some of its recent changes and the dilemmas it creates for knowledge workers in the global periphery. We then examine the making of knowledge through semi-structured interviews with researchers in each of the three domains in Brazil, South Africa and Australia. These interviews covered careers, everyday routines of work, networks and sources of information. Some participants who were selected because of their key roles in the formation of a domain gave longer interviews, about key players and institutions, helping us to ‘map’ the contours of the domains. Chapter Two draws on many of these interviews, plus documentary sources, to provide an historical view of the three domains of knowledge. We also used the interviews to examine the labour process in the three domains. Patterns of work are closely linked to organisational issues, and we studied these through three organisational ethnographies of small research units, one from each of our three domains. In these studies we considered divisions of labour and patterns of work, links with other organisations (both local and overseas), and the pressures faced as units seek funding and control over their knowledge work. Chapter Three presents these findings. xviii

Introduction

The processes through which knowledge becomes accessible is of great importance for the global economy of knowledge, and we studied these through two distinct methods. First, we used the tools of the Web of Science to map publication patterns in the three domains, and the differing country contributions to the global knowledge system. Broadly, the Web of Science provides a map of participation in the global knowledge system from a Northern perspective. Despite this bias, Brazil, South Africa and Australia all appear in the top 25 countries for publication output for the year 2015 in each of our three domains of knowledge. We combined this resource with the method of context-content analysis to gain a more focused picture of the workforce, the institutions and the funding of the three domains. These findings are in Chapter Four. To learn about practices in the world of academic publishing, we employed in-depth, semi-structured interviews with publishers, editors and the research managers of universities in our three countries of residence, plus the USA and Hong Kong: added to obtain a more global picture of academic publishing. These findings are presented in Chapter Five. Further details about the methods of the study are provided in the appendix at the rear of this book. In Chapter Six, we draw mainly from the interviews to analyse how knowledge workers of the Southern tier are placed in the global economy of knowledge, and the ways they respond to their situation. We explore questions of global hegemony, strategies of participation, tensions in the economy of knowledge, patterns of local knowledge and alternative commitments. In the concluding Chapter Seven, we bring together material from the various parts of our project and consider the significance of our findings for the broad understanding of knowledge and its making. In our own careers, the authors of this book have been in the front seat for the changes that have shaken university systems around the world. South Africa has seen dramatic changes resulting from the change of regime in 1994 and later funding constraints; the Brazilian system is heavily based on state-funded institutions and has also been impacted by public spending constraints; while Australian universities have suffered sharp cut-backs in government funding and a wave of managerialism, with rising insecurity for both academic and non-academic staff. Being involved in these processes ourselves, we have been able to interview knowledge workers with some understanding and empathy. This book draws on our own life experiences, and in country-specific ways that allow our experiences to ‘talk’ to the situations of our interviewees: the work they do, how they xix

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

do it, and how they handle their distinctive positions in the knowledge economy. Our conclusions are set out through the chapters of the book, but we need to emphasise one of them from the start. Location does matter: loc­ ation both geographic and socio-political. All knowledge workers must face challenges imposed by their institutional and national context. All know­ ledge workers are affected by location in the global economy of knowledge. For researchers across the global South—in the Southern tier and beyond— this means grappling with the Northern hegemony embedded in instit­ utions. Some accept that hegemony completely, some resist it strongly, many make complex compromises, but no-one can simply escape it. What that means for the production of knowledge, and how location in the Southern tier can be made an asset for knowledge production, we hope to show through the book.

xx

C H A P TE R O N E

Knowledge-Making The Production of Knowledge

The Idea of Social Determination Knowledge workers attract attention today because there is a widespread idea that we live in a knowledge society, an information society, or a technological society. Yet in most fields of research, there is also an idea that the disciplines we work in, and the concepts we work with, do not come from any particular place in that society. They are just in the air, so to speak. When academics cite a particular study—Smith, Jones and Robinson 2010—we rarely stop to think what ethnic group Smith comes from, who Jones is married to, or what untenured job Robinson currently holds. Indeed, the everyday view of science tells us that these details do not matter, that the more generalised the knowledge, the better it is. Science is supposed to be a search for abstract generalisations, laws of nature or society, which apply anywhere and everywhere. It is irrelevant where they come from, or where the facts that underpin them are dug up. This is, in principle, a democratic view. Anyone can contribute, and no government or church can limit the growth of knowledge. There is, however, a counter-current of thought which doubts that wholly decontextualised knowledge is good, or even possible. Some have argued that all intellectual work is shaped by social forces—and not superficially but at the most profound level. This idea was stated with great brilliance in the critique of European philosophy by Gyorgy Lukács. Originally published in 1923 and soon suppressed by authoritarian regimes on both the Right and the Left, his book History and Class Consciousness showed how the class interests of the European bourgeoisie set systematic limits to the philosophy that bourgeois intellectuals could formulate. Lukács’ ideas were taken up and generalised by Karl Mannheim in his 1929 Ideology and Utopia. Though missing Lukács’ critical edge, the idea of the social

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

determination of broad frameworks of thought became the main line of thought in the sociology of knowledge, which still exists as a sub-discipline of sociology. In a later generation, Michel Foucault’s immensely influential work on cultural history showed how systems of knowledge were not only produced by social power but themselves functioned as techniques of power, as means of social discipline (Foucault 1977). Foucault himself applied this reasoning to criminology, medicine and sexology. Foucault’s followers have applied it across an immense range of issues, from science to fashion. In this vision, organised knowledge is not so much a means of enlightenment and liber­ ation as a key disciplinary apparatus of modern society. Sociologists in the generation following Mannheim became interested in the specific form of knowledge called science, and began studying its social organisation. Robert Merton made the best-known contribution, a series of essays collected in 1973 as The Sociology of Science. They examined the cultural background to the emergence of natural science and the way prestige hierarchies developed among researchers. What Merton did not do was question how natural scientists came to their conclusions, so he remained popular with them. Other researchers did ask that question, and made themselves unpopular. The classic laboratory ethnography by Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979) gave its message in its sub-title. Unlike Lukács and Mannheim, the research of Latour and Woolgar involved close-focus observation of the daily routines of know­ ledge workers, in this case peptide researchers in a biochemistry lab. This approach showed how the facts reported in research publications were constructed by intricate social processes revolving around records and inter­ pretations (‘inscriptions’). Social studies of science have flourished since then, though they have divided in a way that will concern us. One line of thought has emphasised the social processes shaping scientific knowledge, both the micro-processes of negotiation emphasised by Latour and Woolgar, and the social structures shaping the institutions of science. A good example is Shapin’s (1994) demonstration that the rules for scientific verification, critical to the authority of the ‘scientific revolution’, were based on the social code governing trust and polite conduct among the English gentry of the seventeenth century. It mattered that the scientists reporting experimental results were gentlemen! The other line—taken by Latour personally—has increasingly emph­asised the non-human component in science and technology. This approach abandoned 2

Knowledge-Making

concepts of social structure for the idea of a world made up of varied assemblages of human and non-human agents. Why social structure cannot be ignored is shown by another group of thinkers. The men who created the sociology of knowledge and science and technology studies ignored the gendered character of their own practices as well as the gender of their object of study. The impact of gender relations on knowledge was demonstrated by a generation of feminist scholars including Sandra Harding (1986) and Dorothy Smith (1990). Science done (or controlled) exclusively by men is not gender-free, it is androcentric. The argument that knowledge is shaped by the situation and interests of the group producing it has come to be known as standpoint epistem­ ology. That is not a happy name, as it suggests there is a fixed standpoint for a whole group. This is a drastic simplification and suggests a static view of what is actually a dynamic process. But the term does invite us to think about the possibility of alternative standpoints, perhaps multiple standpoints. Critical whiteness studies has begun to pose for race relations the kind of issues already identified for class and gender.

Intellectual Workforce and Intellectual Labour Merton’s work, though bland in comparison with the critical studies of science, had the merit of focusing on the people who actually did research, and asking about the cultural and social milieu in which they lived. Standpoint epistemology, in its different forms, asks what social group these people come from and how that might shape their work. Both point to the idea that if knowledge is socially produced, then there must be a production process, resources used in it, and a workforce engaged in it. These are the questions classically addressed by industrial sociology. So we might say that the idea of social determination creates the need for an industrial sociology of knowledge and the knowledge workforce. There is actually a large literature about knowledge workers, under var­ ious names. From the nineteenth century on, the ‘intelligentsia’ has often been regarded as a cultural or political vanguard (Aronowitz 1992). The large contemporary literature about the rise of an information society (Mattelart 2003) presupposes a group who are the bearers of the change— the ‘knowledge workers’. Intellectuals, knowledge workers, managers and technicians have often been pictured as a ‘new class’, an emerging dominant elite in modernity—from Burnham’s (1941) idea of a ‘managerial revolution’ to Rifkin’s (1995) dystopia of an ‘information elite’ under globalisation. 3

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

Most of these discourses tell us little about what intellectuals actually do when carrying out their business. Since Gramsci’s (1971) famous essay ‘The formation of the intellectuals’, which emphasised the social ensemble in which they operate, the focus has been directed firmly away from the labour of intellectuals onto their attitudes, their political influence, or their relations with other social groups. For instance in the literature on the ‘intellectual role’ launched by Znaniecki (1940), which flourished in the post-war decades and was revived by Eyerman (1994), the focus is on social function and group norms or trad­itions. In the literature on intellectuals as a new class, the emphasis is on the social division of labour, on intellectuals’ connections with state and economic power, and sometimes on group norms. Norms were the focus of Gouldner’s (1979) theory of the ‘culture of critical discourse’ among intellectuals, and became the focus of Florida’s (2002) popular account of the ‘creative class’. Mannheim himself set the trend of reflecting on epistem­ ological and political implications, while ignoring the nuts-and-bolts business of producing knowledge. Yet some of the key arguments about intellectuals rest on a conception of intellectual work. Eyerman’s account of the intellectual role, for instance, proposes that recruits to the role are drawn from practitioners of ‘intellect­ual labour’; he names the concept, though does not analyse it. Many arguments about the growth of the academic profession, the new middle class, or the research workforce, presume a shift from individual workers with personal agendas to teams of researchers or cultural specialists producing knowledge in a more industrialised way (e.g. Rothblatt 1997). There is a considerable literature in sociology that focuses on professions and professional workplaces. This includes explicit accounts of the labour process, such as Tancred-Sheriff’s (1985) analysis of the craft basis of academic work and the competing systems of control over it, and Reid’s (2003) study of school teaching as an occupation. Scarborough (1999) points to the general difficulty of managing intellectual labour because of the conflicting logics of action embedded in corporate control, on the one hand, and the occupational communities of knowledge workers on the other. There is an even larger literature on particular techniques of knowledge work, especially computer technology. Though some of the best-known writing on this subject suggests sweeping social change as a direct result of technology (Postman 1993), there is now a more sophisticated research liter­ ature about ‘knowledge-intensive work’ and the organisations in which it occurs (Alvesson 2004). This includes ethnographic descriptions 4

Knowledge-Making

of particular groups of intellectual workers such as computer contractors. They reveal the importance of the social relations, as well as the technology, through which the work is done. For instance, personal connections and informal exchanges of information prove vital in making contract computer work feasible (Barley and Kunda 2004). These research findings justify thinking of intellectual work as a labour process with strongly marked collective characteristics. Contemporary re­ searchers normally work in, or in some connection with, big organisations, and that environment gives them their oxygen. About half the workforce of modern universities are non-academic staff (Szekeres 2011). On their technical, administrative and financial work, and on their commitment to their jobs, the production and circulation of knowledge absolutely depends. Modern knowledge systems are built on complex divisions of labour and extended workforces. Individual creativity and initiative are still there, and still vital, but operating through a social machinery—above all, through cooperation. A fruitful way of thinking about intellectual labour was pioneered by Althusser (1969), who treated scientists as workers who, like any other workers, apply specific tools to specific objects in order to transform them. In intellectual labour, the tools include concepts, classification systems, mathematical techniques, and so on. Those used with particular objects of knowledge are typically organised in the form of disciplines (broadly understood, to embrace management science and theology as well as mathematics). Disciplines are themselves cultural traditions as well as systems of social control (Becher 1989), and may produce significant differences within the labour process. Contemporary intellectual work, then, depends on a collective intellect­ ual: a workforce, a network of cooperation, and a set of institutions. Let us turn to consider the institutions involved.

Knowledge Institutions It is not hard to find historical evidence for the importance of workplaces for understanding intellectuals. Universities themselves have changed the patterns of US intellectual life since the nineteenth century (Bender 1993; Gross 2003), pushing most intellectual workers towards specialisation and away from broad engagements in public life. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, however, did not occur in universities, or not mainly there. Much of it occurred in households 5

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

of leisured gentry. The wealthy man’s private collection, library, labor­atory or greenhouse remained a feature of the European knowledge form­ation well into the nineteenth century. Charles Darwin’s garden at Down House in England is a famous example. But the growth of the new knowledge formation also spawned new types of institutions. Official patronage helped—the Royal Society in London became a model for the generalpurpose scientific association. The model later split into discipline-specific associations. In 1656–65 the Royal Society launched its Philosophical Transactions, one of the first (if not the very first) research journals. There are now around 30,000 peer-reviewed research journals in the world (not counting a large penumbra of dubious and outright fake journals). This apparatus for circulating research-based knowledge has been increasingly taken over by profit-seeking publishing companies (an issue explored in Chapter Five). Approximately half the world’s output of scientific research now appears in journals published by a very small group of transnational corporations and their subsidiaries: Reed-Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon 2015). The gentleman’s private collection of specimens or books grew into the public museum and the public library. The British Museum, which was also a library, was established by an Act of Parliament in the mid-eighteenth century, open to all ‘studious and curious persons’—but it was based on one rich gentleman’s collection, bequeathed to the nation. In time, publiclyfunded collections supported many disciplines: botanic gardens, mineral­ ogical museums and more. Wealthy states sponsored knowledge production, as well as collection, via astronomical and meteorological observatories, government geologists, and oceanographic research vessels. Through the nineteenth century, this crop of knowledge institutions continued to grow, and became increasingly linked with universities, which themselves were being transformed. The model of a research university, pioneered in Germany, gradually spread, especially to the United States. By the early twentieth century the most prestigious universities were strongly involved in research. But already another kind of knowledge institution was emerging, in high-technology industry. The famous chemical industry of Germany developed its own laboratories, and corporate research became a feature of twentieth-century science. The Bell Laboratories in the United States were important in the development of telecommunications and computers, and have chalked up eight Nobel Prizes, one of them for the invention of 6

Knowledge-Making

transistors. Corporate laboratories are central to the modern pharmaceutical industry. These developments, along with the corporate takeover of universities, have raised major questions about the autonomy of science and the credibility of biomedical research. The contemporary research-based knowledge economy, then, is a highly institutionalised terrain. Independent scholars still exist, particularly in the humanities, and some of their work is important. But the research labour process is mainly a matter of teams of workers, operating in an organis­ ational context, funded by governments and corporations, publishing their results in a corporatised system of journals, and increasingly subject to management controls and profit imperatives. Important changes in the knowledge economy seem to be afoot, with the rise of intrusive ‘metrics’ and associated ‘league tables’, an apparent shift from a focus on the raw production of knowledge to a focus on the circulation, consumption and application of knowledge. These trends raise sharp questions about the political implications of knowledge work. A number of writers have seen intellectual workers as bearers of democratic possibilities in advanced capitalism, whether through their shared culture (Gouldner 1979) or the collective character of their work (Gorz 1999). In a more direct way, intellectuals served as represent­ atives of civil society and voices of opposition under authoritarian regimes such as the dictatorship in Brazil and the apartheid regime in South Africa. This role was so prominent that some authors now lament the ‘retreat of intellectuals’ after the transition to democracy (Gumede and Dikeni 2009). A sophisticated version of the democratisation thesis, developed by writers in the Australian journal Arena, linked the ‘constitutive abstraction’ typical of intellectual labour with the relatively egalitarian and network character of relations among intellectual workers (Sharp 1983; Connell 2016). The Arena thesis pictured intellectual workers as bearers of a democratic alternative to capitalist power. This was not a matter of individual autonomy, but followed from a labour process that required a certain detachment from the culturally given, and a readiness to share knowledge. Tests of these arguments have had ambivalent results; but the underlying idea, that the politics of knowledge is linked to the labour by which know­ ledge is produced, is important.

7

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

The Global Economy of Knowledge Imperial Science

The conquest of the world by European and North American power, over the five hundred years of modern empire and globalisation, not only produced material wealth for the imperial powers. It also produced a rich dividend of knowledge. The colonised world was a fabulous mine of information, and the colonisers began sending back information and specimens as early as they sent spices, silver and gold. Brilliant feathers, exotic ornaments, strange plants, animal skins, maps, fragments of languages, and of course samples of native people, were put on the ships to brighten the royal courts in Europe. Eventually the process became more systematic. Information flowed not only from soldiers and sailors but also from missionaries, surveyors, engin­eers, lawyers, and scientifically minded planters and traders. In due course the metropole sent out expeditions whose sole purpose was to gather information. The knowledge dividend of empire spread across almost the whole of the emerging research-based knowledge formation: astronomy, geo-sciences, palaeontology, botany and zoology, meteorology and more. The traffic still flows today, and it is not confined to the natural sciences. There are also close connections between empire and the development of the social sciences (Steinmetz 2013). Australians know about this traffic because it is part of the country’s foundation story, taught in primary schools. The fertile east coast of Australia was, according to this story, discovered by Captain Cook in 1770 (a mere fifty thousand years after the Aboriginal people discovered it). The reason Cook was in the neighbourhood was that he and his ship had been sent by the British government to Tahiti to make astronomical observ­ ations—specifically, to measure the transit of the planet Venus across the face of the sun. He then went to search the south Pacific ocean, and duly bumped into the continent of Australia. He had on board two botanists, who were so excited by the wealth of species they found ashore that Cook called the place ‘Botany Bay’. When the British government decided a few years later to plant a prison colony there, Botany Bay was its colloquial name for a generation, and became the title of a famous song. One of the travelling botanists was a young gentleman called Joseph Banks, who later became president of the Royal Society in London. An Australian family of flowering trees, Banksia, is named for him. But he 8

Knowledge-Making

wasn’t the most famous to collect in the colonial world. The Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt travelled to the Spanish colonies of South and Central America, collecting and mapping in jungles and on mountains, and became an international celebrity. The Humboldt Current is named for him. Even more spectacular was the work of Charles Darwin, a young natur­ alist who sailed on a Royal Navy sloop sent to collect data around South America and the Pacific. The voyage of the Beagle produced observ­ ations that proved vital to the emergence of modern evolutionary biology. However, Darwin was only persuaded to publish the studies that became The Origin of Species when similar ideas were about to be published by another European observer in the colonial world. This was Alfred Russel Wallace, who had been making observations first in the Amazon Basin and then in the Malay archipelago. He is remembered for the ‘Wallace Line’, an early advance in bio-geography. It is a mistake, then, to speak of ‘Western science’, as if the whole thing were cooked up in one corner of the world. It is more accurate to speak of imperial science. The information that flowed from the colonial world was assembled in the museums, libraries, scientific societies, universities, botanic gardens, research institutes, and government agencies of what we now call the global North. The process produced an important structural division of labour. The colonised world was, for the imperial knowledge economy, primarily a source of data. The metropole, where data from different regions were aggregated, produced its own data as well. But crucially, the metropole became the main site of the theoretical moment in knowledge production. The metropole was never the only site of theorisation, as Xavier Polanco (1990) shows in studies of scientific communities in Latin America. But it was certainly the most powerful. The work of theorists in the metropole included the creation of formal generalisations such as the laws of phys­ ical science, and the mathematical formulas that represented them. (Cook sailed to Tahiti because of deductions made from Newton’s laws of motion, applied to planets). Theory also included the regularisation of method, the creation of rules for documentation and proof, and the development of instrumentation, from the microscope to the computer. Northern institutions were also concerned to transform data and theory into applied sciences such as engineering, agronomy and medicine. In this applied form, knowledge was returned to the global periphery. Here it was used by colonial powers, and later post-colonial states, in the mines, in 9

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

agriculture, and in government. Applications of imperial science became central to the ideology of development in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Global Division of Labour

The periphery continues to be a rich source of raw materials for the mainstream knowledge economy in our time. It produces data for the new biology, pharmaceuticals, astronomy, social science, linguistics, archaeology, and more. It is, for instance, a key source of data for modern climate science, as shown in the famous reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the metropole continues to be the main site of theoretical processing in the global economy of knowledge. Here two related developments occurred. One was the formalisation of research methods and the definition of the now-familiar ‘disciplines’ of knowledge. The other was the creation of specialised workforces for producing and circulating knowledge. These processes were increasingly centred in universities, with the spread of the German model of a research university. This model of a university was transferred to the United States by the end of the nineteenth century, and during the twentieth century became the world’s ideal model. It was followed, for instance, when the Chinese government in the 1990s set out to create a group of ‘world class’ universities modelled on the elite univers­ ities of the United States. That policy was the origin of the global ‘league tables’ of universities. In this economy of knowledge, intellectual workers in the global periphery are pushed towards a particular cultural and intellectual stance. Hountondji (1997) uses the term ‘extraversion’ to name the practical ways knowledge workers in the periphery are oriented to, and become dependent on, the institutions, concepts and techniques of the metropole. This stance is familiar to all academics in the periphery. In the mainstream knowledge economy, to function successfully as a scientist in the periphery—whatever the discipline, and whether in Africa, China, South America or Australia—one must read the leading journals published in the metropole. One must know and cite the leading theorists in the metropole. One must learn and apply the research methods taught in the metropole. Successful career paths include advanced training in the metropole, attending conferences in the metropole, and for the more successful, getting jobs in the metropole. To gain status at home, the most direct method is to gain recognition in the metropole. Thus the intellectual frameworks developed in 10

Knowledge-Making

the metropole become embedded in the intellectual work of the peri­phery— not by the exercise of direct control, but by the way the whole economy of knowledge is organised. The discussions of intellectual work and workers outlined earlier in this chapter rarely consider global differences in resources or agendas. Intellectual workers in the global periphery often have less funding, and in poor countries may have practically none. They often have less sophistic­ ated equipment, and often work in institutions that are themselves under severe pressure. It is harder for knowledge workers in the periphery to enter global networks, the ‘invisible colleges’ in their disciplines. In an international knowledge economy which prioritises English, they may face major difficulties about language. In developing countries, intellectual workers often face insistent demands to do applied research rather than fundamental research. Intellectual agendas in the periphery are often shaped by local issues, which (as we will show later) may lead in creative and original direct­ ions, but may also marginalise local work in relation to the global North. Yet many careers in the periphery are deeply invested in the current Northern paradigms. The global economy of knowledge can be surprisingly hard to acknowledge. Researchers often think they are part of a search for universal knowledge that is untainted by place or local interest. They can even become angry when asked to think about the global structures of power that might be shaping their work. Some Northern scholarship about globalisation has declared that the distinction of global North from global South is an obsolete binary. Rather there are complex and multi-directional flows and a system without a centre. One recognises the good intention of such arguments, to acknow­ ledge global complexity and move beyond colonialist stereotypes. But the facts of gross world economic inequalities, disproportionate military and state power, the transnational corporate economy, and the hierarchical practices of knowledge institutions, remain. (For evidence of continuing hierarchies in knowledge see Collyer 2014a; Beigel 2014). There are large inequalities within the metropole and within the peri­ phery, too. The global economy is a dynamic and often turbulent affair. It does not produce a simple dichotomy. It does produce massive structures of centrality and marginality, whose main axis is the metropole-periphery, North-South relationship. Recognising this is crucial to understanding the global politics of know­ ledge. Priority for theory produced in the metropole, and marginality for anything of the sort from the periphery, is the normal functioning of the 11

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

mainstream global economy of knowledge. Innovations in Latin America, or southern Africa, or India, or Australia, are normally not known to each other, until they are adopted and publicised in the global North.

Knowledge and the Periphery

Recognising these inequalities, it is also vital to acknowledge that the imperial knowledge economy was never the only form of organised know­ ledge in the world. Indeed western European knowledge had itself been formed under the influence of texts, sciences and technologies from Arab and Greek Orthodox realms, from India, Africa and as far away as China (Hobson 2004). Every region of the world reached by the new empires and trade networks had been settled already, and most of the seas sailed by European explorers had recently been crossed by Indian, Chinese, Arab and Polynesian sailors too. Once set on the path of empire, the colonisers encountered many sophisticated and complex knowledge systems among the colonised. These had their own intellectual workforces, their own environmental, geographical, historical and medical sciences, their own means of developing knowledge. Sometimes the colonisers tried to obliterate these knowledges—as the Spanish did in Yucatán in the sixteenth century, burning the Maya books and killing the Maya priests. Sometimes they appropriated local know­ ledge—for instance in colonial agriculture, fisheries and mining. Sometimes they recognised and even honoured other epistemes and intellectuals—as some of the British did in India, the early form of ‘Orientalism’. Further, as the imperial economy developed, knowledge workers in the periphery played an active, not a passive, part in its development. Much of the data collection in the colonised world was done by local workers. Local networks and exchanges developed between different parts of the colonised world. Historians of science have demonstrated that the ‘periphery’ was in fact an active site for creating modern forms of knowledge (Medina, Marques and Holmes 2014). The group of scholars who gathered in the journal Quipú has challenged the Eurocentric conception of science since the 1980s. And, of course, colonised peoples did try to understand the process of colonisation itself. They had their own cultural and intellectual traditions to build on, as well as the ideas of the colonisers and the experience of living in colonial society. Distinctive knowledge projects arose from this situation: ranging from Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa (1916)—a research-based account of the devastation produced by the colonial state’s seizure of indigenous lands—to the remarkable 12

Knowledge-Making

Visva-Bharati college in India founded by Rabindranath Tagore to provide a meeting place for multiple civilisations. This history lies behind the recent rise of a critique of global North dominance in the humanities and social sciences. There are a number of currents in this movement. They include ‘post-colonial theory’ inspired from India and the Arab world; the ‘de-colonial’ movement focussed on the colonis­ ation of Latin America; the exploration of alternative traditions in social science and the possibility of post-colonial sociology (Patel 2010); the recognition of indigenous knowledge; and research on Southern theory growing out of the colonial encounter. The most clear-cut alternative is provided by the idea of indigenous knowledge. Except where colonisation involved absolute genocide, elem­ ents of pre-colonisation knowledge have survived. In principle they offer a standpoint independent of the Western knowledge system. This has been most vigorously endorsed in Africa (see the discussions in Odora Hoppers 2002), but similar arguments for indigenous knowledge are found in North and South America, in Australia, and elsewhere. The de-colonial school (Mignolo 2007; Santos 2014) often comes close to this, proposing a politics of knowledge based on absolute opposition between the colonising culture and the colonised. Indigenous knowledge movements present a powerful critique of the imperialist structure of knowledge in mainstream social science, where colonised peoples are still treated as the objects of knowledge. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s influential book Decolonizing Methodologies (1999/2012), based on Maori struggles for cultural survival in Aotearoa New Zealand, shows how colonised people can become the subjects of their own knowledge projects and educational practices. Indigenous knowledge projects generally imply a mosaic epistemology, in which separate knowledge formations sit beside each other like tiles in a mosaic. Each knowledge formation is based on a specific culture or histor­ ical experience, and each has its own claims to validity. Mosaic epistem­ ology offers a clear alternative to Northern hegemony and global inequality, replacing the priority of one knowledge system with respectful relations among many. However a mosaic approach also faces major difficulties. They were pointed out by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf (2003) in her careful critique of a wellknown Afrocentric text about gender. Cultures and societies are dynamic, not fixed in one posture. Pre-colonial societies were not silos, but interacted with each other over long periods of time, absorbed outside influences, and 13

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

showed internal diversity. These arguments are reinforced when we recognise the massive disruption of existing societies by colonialism and postcolonial power. As a result of this disruption, much contemporary research outside the metropole is done in conditions where ‘relative chaos, gross economic disparities, displacement, uncertainty and surprise’ are the norm not the exception (Bennett 2008: 7). The indigenous knowledge retort to imperial science has had a polit­ ical impact. The consequences have not always been happy. The attempt in South Africa to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic by using local healing practices instead of antiretroviral drugs (rather than making these approaches mutually supporting) was a devastating mistake that cost many lives (Green 2012). Hountondji is one who is critical of a silo approach to indigenous knowledge. His concept of ‘endogenous knowledge’ emphasises the active processes of knowledge production that arise in colonised societies and have a capacity to speak beyond them. The emphasis in this concept is communication not separation (Hountondji 1997; 2002). The idea of communication, of new kinds of connection between know­ ledge projects in the post-colonial world, is at the centre of discussions in social science about what Gurminder Bhambra (2014) calls ‘connected sociologies’. It is, of course, important to establish that there are different sociologies to connect! An important step here is the historical document­ ation of multiple knowledge formations, clearly presented by Sujata Patel in her ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (2010), and by Farid Alatas in his Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science (2006). As João Maia (2011) shows in the case of Brazil, the intellectuals of settler/creole populations also produced social knowledge that had different themes and sensibilities from those of European social science. This work provides important evidence of the heterogeneity of social knowledge projects around the post-colonial world, and the different ways that knowledge can be valorised. There are place-based knowledge form­ ations embedded in local cultures; this is familiar in Aboriginal Australia. But there are also knowledge formations that have universal scope. Farid Alatas (2006), for instance, shows how the universalism of Islamic thought gave rise to powerful social theories which have applications far beyond their place of birth. His key example is the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, whose ideas can be applied to a wide range of historical-political problems (Alatas 2014). There are many other examples of knowledge projects based in Islam. Producing knowledge for local purposes, rather than for export into a global knowledge economy, has long been part of the work of intellectuals 14

Knowledge-Making

in colonial and post-colonial societies. This may be for activist purposes, such as the nationalist histories written for independence movements; or it may respond to problems that hardly exist in the global North, such as the social issues in post-colonial mega-cities. Recognising local agendas for knowledge formation, as will be seen later in the book, is important even in the mainstream knowledge economy. The framing of epistemological issues in terms of ‘diversity’ or ‘alter­ natives’ still leaves us with a problem: the overwhelming, and indeed growing, authority of the Northern-centred knowledge formation. Here the contribution of the de-colonial theorists is important. Their work has involved a critique of the formation of European modernity within imper­ ialism. Aníbal Quijano’s (2000) account of the ‘coloniality of power’ names the way institutions and culture in the post-colonial world continue to be structured by relations with the metropole. Some scholarship now speaks, in a convenient shorthand, of the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (e.g. Tlostanova 2015). In the light of this work, it is clear that connecting knowledge form­ ations from different parts of the world requires a profound critique of the Northern-centred global economy of knowledge. This critique leads to a view of the history of modern natural and social science that differs from the familiar story of European heroes and the global diffusion of their ideas. The story, rather, centres on the exclusion of the knowledge produced in colonised societies—or its inclusion unrecog­ nised—and the replacement of multiple knowledge formations with a global structure of centrality and marginality. The exploration of Southern theory starts with this critique and the realisation that alternatives remain, indeed are still being produced (Connell 2007; Epstein and Morrell 2012). It can be shown that key categories of Northern social science arise from the experience of the societies of the global metropole and their position in the history of imperialism. These produce characteristic moves such as the claim of universality, reading from the centre, gestures of exclusion, and the grand erasure of colonialism itself (Connell 2006a). Such moves can be found even in specialised areas of social science. Helen Meekosha (2011), for instance, shows how they have distorted the social analysis of disability. Questions about disability look very different when seen on a world scale, prioritising the experience of the colonised. From colonised peoples, from settler populations, from post-colonial societies grappling with dependence, violence and new forms of exploit­ ation, a wealth of new knowledge has emerged. This knowledge, produced 15

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

in the colonial and post-colonial encounter, contains a strong component of theory, that is to say concepts, methodologies, intellectual framings and agendas—‘Southern theory’ itself. As Wiebke Keim’s (2011) careful study of industrial sociology in South Africa shows, it may represent a counterhegemonic alternative to the mainstream knowledge formation. Southern theory is often formulated in different genres from those of the mainstream knowledge formation, because the circumstances of Northern research universities were almost never reproduced in the colonial world, and only rarely in the post-colonial world. Whatever the genre, however, no-one could deny the power and originality of thinkers like Heleieth Saffioti, Ashis Nandy, Paulin Hountondji, Samir Amin, Ali Shariati, Celso Furtado, or Bina Agarwal, to mention only a few major thinkers in the social sciences.

Dynamics of Change on a World Scale De-colonisation and Development

The modern economy of knowledge was first built in the era of conquest and consolidated at the high tide of European global empire, in the nineteenth century. But the pattern of empire was constantly changing, and during the twentieth century direct overseas rule came to an end (apart from a few remnants that persist today). Struggles for independence, led by creole elites, had swept North and South America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now independence campaigns, and sometimes anti-colonial wars, spread in Asia, Africa, the Arab world and the Pacific. And these changes created conditions for the knowledge alter­ natives that already existed to be more fully and forcefully expressed. In the second half of the twentieth century the political pattern of empire was replaced by more than a hundred legally independent, though often economically dependent, states. First they were roughly grouped into three blocs in the cold war, then the political blocs disintegrated. This left one global economic and military hegemon—the corporate oligarchy in the United States (Starrs 2013)—partly counterbalanced by the unstable European Union, and the growing power and wealth of the Chinese dictatorship. In this changing geo-political scene, the newly independent states in Africa and Asia, as well as the long-independent states of south and central America, the settler-colonial states and the periphery of Europe, faced the demand for economic development. 16

Knowledge-Making

Two main development strategies were available in the post-war decades. The first of these was the Soviet-style command economy, which had been given extra credibility by the astonishing Soviet defeat of fascist Germany in 1941–45. This strategy was attempted by some countries in the Arab world as well as eastern Europe and China. The second was the strategy of import-replacement industrialisation, recommended by the new development economics led by Celso Furtado and Raúl Prebisch, the famous CEPAL strategy (Kay 1998). This proposed a state-supported capitalist industrial development in the periphery, a strategy that has been revived in a new form by the post-Mao communist regime in China. Both strategies placed heavy reliance on the state as a development agency. Its tasks lay in guiding economic activity (it was still the era of Plans), mobilising capital directly or indirectly, and providing the background conditions for economic growth. The last of these requirements brought the developmental state directly into the knowledge economy. It was committed to promoting literacy and expanding elementary school systems, and this easily extended to promoting technical and professional education. Workforces were needed for industry, communications, public health, re-organised agriculture, and more; and this meant providing higher education. Many developmental states took the next step, into sponsoring research. At a minimum, researchers were needed to adapt imperial science to the needs of local populations and agriculture, as in the ‘green revolution’ in India. More ambitiously, they were wanted for fundamental research contributing to the global knowledge form­ation (Hountondji 1973). In all these aims, developmental states found strong support in multilateral agencies such as UNESCO and WHO. The expansion of education and science was one thing the antagonists in the cold war could agree on. So bilateral aid, such as grants from US corporate foundations—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, etc.—also went into these knowledge development pro­ jects. The practice of bringing young intellectual workers to the metropole for advanced training, which had occurred on a modest scale in the old empires, was systematised and expanded. The crucial institutional step was the expansion of state-supported universities across the post-colonial world. A number of small universities had been created by the colonial powers as long ago as the sixteenth century, in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. In the second half of the twentieth century the number and size of post-colonial universities multiplied, and their research capacity expanded dramatically. For instance in Australia the 17

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

national government, which had taken little interest in universities earlier, in the 1940s and 1950s began pumping money into an expanded university system and gave it a research capacity (Forsyth 2014). In Brazil, bureaucratic elites and the military created in 1951 the National Council for Scientific Research, now known as CNPq, and a federal agency for fostering graduate programmes, CAPES. In Latin America as a whole, UNESCO was crucial in providing material and intellectual resources to new research institutions such as CLAPCS and FLACSO. In most developing countries there was little alternative to public universities as a base for research. There were few corporations with the size and wealth to fund research. Aid programmes and NGOS involved in development work might have a need for knowledge, but the research they funded was generally short-term and focussed on practical problems (Mkandawire 2005). Free-standing public sector research agencies were created in some settings, for instance CERES, a notable centre for economic and social research in Tunisia. But to sustain an intellectual workforce as well as diversify a research effort, a university system was effectively required.

The Neoliberal Turn

From the 1970s on, the model of the developmental state that had underpinned this growth of public education systems was increasingly challenged by agendas based on free market capitalism. We now live in a world of markets, we are constantly told, and have to do what markets require. Modern subjectivity is about selling the self, and creating marketable narratives for Facebook, YouTube, and the next gig. Corporations not only buy and sell in markets, they create internal markets and profit centres, and constitute their workers as mini-firms, contractors. Government itself has to act like a firm, scale down debt, sell off unprofit­ able assets, lure foreign capital, make a financial surplus. The modern university has to find a new business model, to become entrepreneurial, to produce what the market wants (Tuchman 2009; Collini 2012). What these exhortations and clichés add up to is a social and political common sense (to use Gramsci’s language) that reveals the hegemony of neoliberalism. ‘Neoliberalism’ is not a term in common use in the global North, but it is useful to understand global changes. Neoliberalism broadly means the agenda of economic and social transformation under the sign of the free market that has come to dominate global politics in the last quarter-century. It also means the institutional arrangements to implement this project that have been installed, step by 18

Knowledge-Making

step, in countries and organisations under neoliberal control. Neoliberal policymakers try to widen existing markets, and to create new markets where they did not exist before. These processes are at work not only in the economy as it used to be understood, but also in welfare, education, health and security services, and many of the spaces of everyday life (Braedley and Luxton 2010). The best-known accounts treat neoliberalism as a system of ideas, a shift in the dominant ideology of capitalist society, ‘the ruling ideas of the time’ (Harvey 2005; Klein 2007). Neoliberal doctrine is thought to spring from a group of Right-wing economists in Europe and the United States, notably Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who attacked the welfare state and political regulation of the economy. Their ideas were picked up by Thatcher and Reagan as a new agenda for populist Right-wing politics, and by Volker, at the US Federal Reserve, as a guide to economic policy. The global North then imposed neoliberalism on the rest of the world, via the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, other loan agencies, and where necessary, by military force. There is some truth in this story, but there is also a massive gap. The authors have followed the common pattern of academic argument that treats the society of the global North as the driving force of global change. In fact, the first thoroughly neoliberal regime was not in the global North, but in the far South, the civil-military dictatorship in Chile; and there is a large Latin American research literature on the trend (e.g. Kay 1998; Gutiérrez and Schönwälder 2010). Neoliberal ideas were circulating in Latin American Right-wing politics even before Pinochet came to power; and neoliberal policies proliferated in other parts of the periphery in the 1970s, before Reagan and Thatcher came to power. Neoliberalism in the global South presented itself not as the rolling-back of a bloated welfare state—which scarcely existed in the periphery—but as a new development strategy (Domingues 2008; Connell and Dados 2014). It replaced the two main development strategies available in the 1950s–1970s, import-replacement industrialisation and state-controlled economy. Neoliberalism in the South has functioned as a Right-wing development agenda, entirely compatible with authoritarian regimes. Market-friendly policies were intended to overcome the rigidities of planning-economies, the problems of small internal markets and the power of Southern working classes, by a re-positioning of Southern economies in global markets. This re-positioning involves a search for comparative advantage, rather than an attempt at broad-based local industrialisation. Its banner industries are 19

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

mining (including oil and gas extraction), large-scale agriculture, and lowwage manufacturing for export. The last is the basis of the ‘south China miracle’, the maquiladoras of Mexico, and the export processing zones of South and South-east Asia, striking features of neoliberal geography. Its banner technology is not so much the computer as the container (Levinson 2006). Globally-constituted neoliberalism does not mean Northern neoliberalism globalised. The global South, after all, was historically constituted by a vast process that the North did not share: the process of being colonised by the North. The history of five hundred years of empire, not the internal history of North-Atlantic states, is the background to understanding neoliberalism on a world scale. Under neoliberal regimes, economies of the South were increasingly integrated into a globally extended trading and finance system. The new institutional forms of this economy—the large transnational corporations, the finance and commodity markets, the integrated electronic commun­ ic­ation systems, and the international state—were still centred on Europe and North America. This was the context in which knowledge institutions also followed the neoliberal turn.

The Commodification of Knowledge

In the last generation there has been a worldwide trend to merge education and research into the corporate economy. This process has followed different paths in different countries. Some of its elements have a longer history, such as the commodification of knowledge in the form of commercial patents. Albert Einstein wrote the first version of relativity theory while he was employed as a technical assistant, Grade III, in the Swiss patent office. It is only recently, however, that the elements have come together in a sweeping change in the knowledge economy. Basically, the knowledge institutions created by previous generations, mostly in the public sector and governed by an ideology of public interest, have been turned increasingly into cost-recovery and profit-making mechanisms. A convergence between university and corporate knowledge-making has developed (Powell and Owen-Smith 2002). Universities and other public sector knowledge institutions have been remade on the model of competitive firms. In Australia, a dramatic example of this change, the proportion of university funds provided from the federal budget, has fallen drastically, from about 90 per cent at the end of the 1980s, and it fell to near 40 per cent in the late 2010s. Government funding has fallen in other systems too, including the UK and USA. These shortfalls 20

Knowledge-Making

have been met by turning public university systems into fee-paying systems. Meanwhile the number of for-profit universities and colleges has boomed. In India, students in private institutions are now about half of all higher education enrolments in the country (Gupta 2016), and in Brazil the proportion is even higher. In this environment, student fees have constantly risen. Large numbers of students are obliged to go into debt, raising loans from governments, finance businesses, and families. The universities have thus became financially dependent on markets, and increasingly put resources into advertising, to improve their position in these markets. The new policy regime has pushed universities, instead of working cooperatively as a public education sector, to act like firms competing against each other for funding, students, prestige and profit. Growing stratification within the sector is reflected in the multiplication of ‘league tables’ since the early 2000s. These are obsessively reported in the media, accompan­ ied by boasts or excuses from university managers about their institution’s ‘performance’. In some parts of the world, the neoliberal turn has stimulated the growth of a powerful managerial elite inside universities. In Australia, for instance, there has been a spectacular rise in managerial salaries, with some Vice Chancellors now paid over a million dollars per year (see Thornton 2014; Lyons, Tager and Sales 2016). In places where public universities have remained part of the bureaucratic machinery of the state, as in Brazil, this is less marked. That situation, however, can change with a shift in government policy, such as the 2009 Universities Act in Finland, in which a Right-wing government corporatised public universities comprehensively (Välimaa 2012). Universities increasingly treat their workforce the way other corpor­ations treat theirs. One favoured strategy is to outsource parts of the operation. Considerable sections of the operations stuff, such as printing, ICT support, security, and building maintenance, have gone this way. Another strategy is to lower labour costs by casualising the work. Even in the wealthiest university system, the United States, the number of insecure ‘adjunct’ teachers has grown massively while the number of tenured faculty has stagnated (Schwartz 2014). Yet another strategy involves on-line control systems, which have spread to cover most aspects of university work, from minor expenses to the nomination of PhD examiners. New performance management regimes oblige staff to monitor themselves and report their performance to the managers. Researchers are placed 21

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

under pressure to publish in what are defined as the ‘top’ journals. The top journals in the league tables, as we have seen, are almost all published in the United States or western Europe. The audit culture of managerial universities thus reinforces the extraversion of academic workers in the global periphery. The growing inequality within and between universities, the new techniques of surveillance and control, the periodic outsourcing, restructuring and forced redundancy, have produced a rising level of distrust and alienation in university systems. The managers no longer trust the professionalism and commitment of its academic and operations staff, and it is clear that many of the staff no longer trust management. There are also profit opportunities in patentable discoveries from research. This is especially true in biomedical research, where corporate influence is now profound. Legal changes have made patenting of research findings easier, scientific journals have been compromised, ‘intellectual property rights’ have become increasingly important. Research universities now always have an office devoted to exploiting intellectual property, and research staff are encouraged to become researcher-entrepreneurs in search of funding and profits (Lander 2005). The result of these developments is a widening split between teaching and research. This undoes the basic logic of the research university where teaching and research are integrated. The research effort in universities increasingly resembles that in free-standing research institutes, which have themselves been subject to the same policy pressures in the last generation, with similar results. The two types of institutions now compete for both corporate and government money. Our research, therefore, is done at a time when the research-based knowledge formation is in flux institutionally, with competing pressures on knowledge workers. There are demands to serve personal careers, instit­ utional privilege, national interests, cultural loyalty, social need, and— not least—the interests of knowledge itself. These demands, and the new requirements of neoliberal universities, shape the lives of knowledge workers across the Southern tier, as we shall see in the following chapters.

22

C H A P TE R T WO

The New Domains of Knowledge Knowledge domains are invariably created or named in retrospect. Attempts to answer a question generate interest and attention, and in time, a body of literature that is held to have coherence, comes to be recognised. It is paradoxical that in trying to analyse knowledge inequalities we first have to start with the North. The mechanisms by which a domain is recognised, and hence held to exist, involves academic and research production and this production is dominated by the North. Scientists and researchers in the North generally need to recognise that a problem exists, and is important, before they write about it and dedicate resources to it. So even if the problem affects the South much more than the North, the way in which a knowledge domain comes to exist depends on some form of acknowledgment by scholars and scientists working in the North. If the recognition of domains reflects the intellectual power of the North it does not follow that the content of each knowledge domain is determined by the North. As we show here, each of these knowledge domains was influenced by intellectuals in the South. The concepts and theories developed were adopted, adapted, moulded and in some cases rejected by scholars and researchers in the South. There are different ways of dating the formation of the three domains. All have a pre-history: the HIV/AIDS domain in the stories of virology, epid­ emiology and sexology; climate change in the long history of atmospheric science; gender studies in psychoanalysis, social science and feminism. Some specific markers are notable. Scholarly interest in gender issues built up rapidly in the 1970s in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Climate research was boosted by the 1979 World Climate Conference and especially the 1988 formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. HIV/AIDS research crystallised after the clear-cut identification of the disease in 1981–82. By the early 1980s, journal articles of relevance in the three domains were appearing in the international indexes, as shown in detail in Chapter Four. We may say that by the end of that decade, all three domains were well-established as international, interdisciplinary knowledge projects.

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

The Knowledge Domain of Gender Second wave feminism stimulated global research into gender inequalities. Responding to energy and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly social science and humanities researchers began to explore not just the position of women but the social construction of the category ‘gender’ and its conceptualisation. While the mainspring of feminist scholarship was to be found in the social movements of the North, these meshed with anti-imperialist political agendas, indigenous and autonomous feminist politics in the South and had a worldwide impact. The domain evolved rapidly and involved controversial relations between biological and social science, and its political and conceptual treatment of the third world, race and sexual orientation. Right-wing politics in all three countries resisted feminism. In Australia this was felt particularly in education, in Brazil it was expressed in the sphere of religion and in South Africa, race was mobilised to deny the relevance of gender. Researchers and writers were invariably activists of a sort, engaging in various sorts of struggle—against patriarchal power within the academy and in publishing circles, in the positioning of feminism within local pol­ itics, and in the search for an authentic voice to speak of location. The latter position has become ever more conscious as writers have begun to recognise the marginalisation of certain viewpoints, the unspoken power of Northern hegemony (often white and middle class) and their own unwitting accept­ ance of some of these views.

The Gender Knowledge Domain in Australia

Concern about women’s status had been a cultural or political issue in settlercolonial Australia since the 1880s. There was little relevant research, however, before the 1970s, with two exceptions. Ethnographic research about Aboriginal life in Australia dealt prominently with marriage, kinship and descent; and the gradually-developing sociology of settler communities included a number of studies of family life. This was to change dramatic­ally. Australia’s economy had been through a period of rapid industrial­is­ation, expansion of a public university system capable of research, and rising levels of education especially among girls and women. In the 1960s a ‘New Left’ appeared in Australia, non-communist, mostly youthful and rather countercultural, its main base being universities but aligned with trade unions especially in anti-war activism. Many of the people who were to pioneer gender studies were involved in activism in the 1960s and early 1970s, and we interviewed several of these. 24

The New Domains of Knowledge

Some came from traditions of radicalism—Erica’s parents, for example, were members of the Communist party. Issues of political economy drove concerns about capitalism and class exploitation and in some cases these reflected family history. Pat was the first of her family to go to university and found Australian universities ‘stuffy’. Others were energised by their university experiences. Simon encountered issues of sexuality and became active in the gay movement. There was a confluence between these ideas and politics, and most expressed their commitment in activist ways, protesting racism against Aboriginal peoples, representing women’s organis­ ations or working in abortion clinics. The advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement around 1970–72 triggered an explosion of research and writing. Newsletters and activist magazines proliferated, such as MeJane (1971) and Refractory Girl (1972); the latter published early research reports. Academic journals followed: Hecate (1975) published feminist literary studies, Australian Feminist Studies (1985) published across disciplines. In 1974–75 a stream of feminist books in history, sociology, literature and other disciplines began to flow, helped by interest from the local branches of publisher Penguin, and the independent publisher George, Allen and Unwin. The themes of this research included critiques of patriarchal bias in existing disciplines, such as anthropology; the recovery of women’s history in Australia; the study of women’s writing; studies of gender in everyday life and in mass media; research on gender relations in schools; women’s employment and economic conditions; studies of women’s health, sex differences in health, and gender-based violence. A largely separate literature on gay and lesbian history developed. The growth of gender studies in Australia was part of a global trend. Two Australian writers wrote liberationist texts that became internationally famous: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971). But it is symptomatic that Greer was living in England at the time, and much of Altman’s material came from the USA. Erica remembers the domain ‘was very international from the beginning, had a very international flavour’. Women’s studies within universities began with individual courses around 1975 and consol­ idated in the 1980s when the environment became ‘supportive’. ‘There was a strong sense that feminism was very important and it was going to be acknowledged’ (Rowena, gender, Australia). Australia’s gender researchers read widely and were influenced both by the international literature and the growing weight of local research. Pat 25

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

was dissatisfied with the ‘liberal feminist stuff that was very popular at the time’, was on the lookout for ‘debates within Marxist feminist literature, and the sort of structuralist culturalist debates’. She was inspired by Making the Difference (1982), an analysis of Australian schooling from a class and gender perspective by Raewyn Connell, Dean Ashenden, Sandra Kessler and Gary Dowsett. Cath began drawing on post-colonial writings—‘people like Bhabha and Spivak, so I drew on a lot of post-colonial theory because that really addressed issues of injustice, inequity, hierarchy, racism, col­ onialism’. But Raewyn Connell’s work was particularly important for her, and she describes how her students and colleagues responded to Raewyn’s visit to their department: ‘oh my god Raewyn Connell’ (Cath, gender, Australia). From about 1985 a second wave of gender studies can be discerned. Poststructuralist thought from Europe became increasingly influential, along with other forms of theory. The politics of feminism itself was reconsidered, and Aboriginal critiques of White feminism were heard. Studies of men, boys and masculinity took shape in the 1980s and attracted wide attention in the 1990s. Studies of technology, embodiment and gender emerged, also with international impact. Pioneering social research on transsexuality was done but failed to get international recognition. Sexuality became an important focus. Simon remembers that in the 1960s and 1970s ‘many feminists did not want to talk about sexuality and there was after all, there were various leading feminists who wanted to be, to distance themselves very clearly from the idea that they were lesbian’ (Simon, gender, Australia). By the late 1980s and 1990s this was changing as a result of the AIDS pandemic and the growth of the gay movement, and Australian research in this area did circulate internationally. Most of the teaching initiatives were interdisciplinary and often underresourced. It was easier to take bold steps in some of the newer universities. ‘There was the space, there was the space’, said Rowena, reflecting on being part of women’s studies programmes in the late 1970s. By the 1990s the domain had obviously matured and changed; the name ‘gender studies’ was increasingly used. Australian universities hosted international conferences, and gender studies units ‘became a bit of a magnet’ for visiting inter­ national scholars (Pat, gender, Australia). Researchers formed important connections with policymakers and professionals, in domains like education, health and employment. Australia became a centre of gender research, well-connected globally, but especially with Northern institutions: 26

The New Domains of Knowledge I went to the London Institute of Education for my first sabbatical and that is partly because I had been invited to a conference over there which was a UNESCO Conference which was looking at the education of girls, and so it was great because I had the chance to meet Diana Leonard and Debbie and Val Hay (Pat, gender, Australia).

So while there was collaboration and increasing interaction, ‘the nexus was (still) either England or the USA’ (Pat, gender, Australia). In the later 1990s, however, the picture changed. The conservative parties in Australian politics became increasingly anti-feminist and homophobic. Gender equity programmes were attacked and de-funded; this climaxed in 2016–17 when ultra-conservative politicians mounted a fierce attack on the ‘Safe Schools’ programme that was intended to reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Gender research has continued in the univer­ sities, but some gender studies teaching programmes have been dismantled by university managers. The domain may be intellectually mature, but it is not organisationally secure.

The Gender Knowledge Domain in Brazil

The history of gender studies in Brazil dates back to the 1970s, a decade marked by political authoritarianism. Between 1968 and 1975 domestic repression was at its height. Many women who took an active role in politics became acquainted with feminism as part of a process of political awareness. Some discovered feminism when they went into exile. In 1975, a year declared to be International Women’s Year by the United Nations, the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC) held a session on the human sciences and its contribution to improving the role of women in Brazilian society. In the same year funding began to be available, largely provided by the Ford Foundation but channelled through the Brazilian agency for funding science, the Carlos Chagas Foundation. Marxism was the major theoretical influence. One of the national founders of the domain, Heleieth Saffioti, completed her thesis ‘Women in Class Society’ in 1967 at the State University of Sāo Paolo. Saffioti was the daughter of a seamstress and a mason and her work reflected strong working-class sympathies. Her thesis was an extraordinarily progressive piece of work, influencing a generation of Brazilian scholars and showing the strength of materialist-feminist approaches to research. One of our interviewees, Cecília, was a pioneer of gender studies in Brazil. She completed her PhD at a global North university in the late 27

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

1970s where militant feminism was a major intellectual and political force. Another, in the same generation, was Fernanda. She worked in Brazil as a journalist but found conditions under the dictatorship untenable and moved to France in 1973. Fernanda had already been involved in Left politics in Brazil but when she got to France she was swept up by the feminist movement which was experiencing unparalleled political success: …it was a moment of great vigour, of a rupture within Left-wing thought, in which it was possible for women to formulate new analytical categories, specific for the understanding of inequalities and asymmetries between men and women (Cecília, gender, Brazil).

Feminist activism went hand-in-hand with opposition to the regime. The women’s movement had support from communists and other Left-wing groups, though these relations were not conflict-free. Women’s organis­ ations played an active part in the democratic movement, including in the ‘Movimento Feminino pela Anistia’ (Feminine movement for Amnesty) and ‘Centro da Mulher Brasileira’ (Centre of Brazilian Women). In the 1980s, links with Euro-feminism were strengthened and maintained through a flow of postgraduate students from Brazil to France, and French scholars visiting Brazil. Gender studies, according to Cecília, ‘was a field that was internationalised from the start. That became international and never stopped’. One of the results of this was that the theoretical debt was largely to European feminists. ‘The major works, the major authors… are all international. At first Simone de Beauvoir and so on. In another moment Joan Scott. Afterwards (Judith) Butler’. The links with French feminism were both intellectual (scholars were reading French feminist works) and personal. As Fernanda remembers from her time in France: …everything was possible in the 1970s [She met Christine Delphy, Françoise Picq…] Ah, there are so many, wow… So many in France… Well, the 1970s were so extraordinary that I twice went to the house of Simone de Beauvoir (Fernanda, gender, Brazil). While links with Europe remained strong, Brazilian scholars began to develop their own journals, networks, research agendas and links with activists. The first local gender journal was established in 1992. Revista de Estudos Feministas. Lena Lavinas was a key player, approaching the Ford Foundation to fund the new journal and ensuring that it showcased local articles (in Portuguese) but also had some translated into English for a 28

The New Domains of Knowledge

wider audience. Lavinas was also very proactive in trying to keep space for feminist debate open, inviting cross-disciplinary contributions as well as using the journal as a vehicle for activism. The journal succeeded in putting Brazil onto the global publishing map: but at some cost. Only six per cent of ‘landmark’ authors were Latin American, although 95 per cent were women (Diniz and Foltran 2004). The scholars who followed in the footsteps of the 1970s pioneers drew on some of the same intellectual resources but now also had available a local stock of research and gender networks. Maria studied psychology in the 1990s. She credits Mauro Cabral, historian, Argentinian philosopher and intersex activist, as a major influence. Maria’s networks are largely South American, leading to research work in Brazil and Peru. In the 2000s, identity politics and concerns about race became an import­ ant and contested part of the domain, though black feminists such as Lélia González and Sueli Carneiro had been challenging racism since the 1970s and 1980s. This growing awareness about race and gender eventually led to the creation of institutions and NGOs such as CRIOLA, which articulate academic knowledge, public policy and activism. In the last few years, social media has become a relevant site for young black women to organise and share ideas about race and gender, and a new generation of scholars has been exploring the links between academia and social networks. Carolina studied the history of slavery and this brought her to the history of black women in Brazil. She feels that the discipline of history has not been receptive to the ‘idea of repairing the historic silence about women’ and has responded by ‘…only including women in history, but without thinking about important questions of gender relations, such as patriarchalism, the question, in the case of black women, of the sexualisation and much more, thinking about these marks of inequality’ (Carolina, gender, Brazil). Carolina became particularly aware of these issues when she travelled to the US to do a doctorate and discovered Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought. She describes her growing realisation: ‘Wow, contact with AfroAmerican feminism is very important for me’. She comments, with a sense of protest, at: …how much we do not think of a tradition of black feminist social thought. And how much, from the experiences of black women from the time of slavery to the present, this should be understood as a type of production of social thought, and not only as historical processes in which black women were victims (Carolina, gender, Brazil). 29

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

Masculinity research as part of the gender domain has been led in Brazil by the NGO Promundo, with its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. Founded in 1997 and led in its early years by Gary Barker, Promundo pursued a gender equality agenda via formative research and evaluation. It implem­ ented evidence-based educational and community-wide programs, and partnered women’s rights groups. A major focus has been men’s violence and working with men to re-shape masculinities (including programmes on fatherhood) and to shift gender norms. Promundo eventually was a founding member of a global alliance called MenEngage, which was funded and supported by the Brazilian government, United Nations, World Bank and World Health Organization (Barker and Ricardo 2005; Promundo 2006). The maturation of the domain of gender in Brazil was associated with collaborations with government and its schooling system. Maria, for example, worked with the Ministry of Education and schools on a further edu­cation project: We actually propose(d) a type of acceptance of questions related to gender and sexuality, related to violence, well… violations of rights. Where we actually do a lot of directing, so we try to put together a service network, of accepting LGBT questions, the question of violence against women. And we have worked very strongly with workshops and consultancy in schools. We have worked very, very closely with education, with schools (Maria, gender, Brazil).

The gender domain in Brazil has developed to include a wide range of concerns that don’t all easily fit into a feminist framework, nor do all express reservations about the narrowness of the frame (as Carolina does). Nevertheless the domain has undoubtedly grown, and most universities have gender courses from undergraduate to postgraduate, and there are many lecturers who consider themselves to be working within the gender domain. Cecília feels that the gender domain is ‘very strong, very strong in Brazil’.

The Gender Knowledge Domain in South Africa

Women’s movements date back to the early twentieth century and have included the white and middle class suffragettes and, amongst African women, were led by activists such as Charlotte Maxeke. Maxeke was one of the first black women to graduate in South Africa. The gathering strength of a women’s movement was demonstrated in the Women’s Charter of 1955, drawn up by a non-racial gathering of women declaring opposition to apartheid. Women and gender studies emerged in South Africa in the 30

The New Domains of Knowledge

late 1970s. Activism fused with research and scholarship with the return of postgraduate students, who in the 1960s had studied feminism in Europe (particularly the UK) and North America. By the mid-1970s particularly, sociology and history courses in the segregated white, so-called ‘liberal’, universities were dedicating lectures to feminism. But it was only in the 1980s, and particularly in the second half of the 1990s, that the production of published gender work boomed (Morrell and Clowes 2016). Despite a veritable explosion of publications from 2005, however, South Africa remains a minor player, ranking only 23rd by output in 2015 (for more detail, see Chapter Four). Many of those who became leading gender researchers were drawn to feminism as part of a process of radicalisation generated through their encounters with apartheid. Amongst the earliest of these was Ellen, whose family included a grandfather who had been Bolshevik in Lithuania. Leftwing affiliations ran deep. Her father, a medical doctor, and her mother, associated themselves with the anti-apartheid movement in the 1950s. A similar trajectory was followed by Nancy whose political commitments at university led to her volunteering for service in a rural hospital with very high infant mortality rates and, subsequently, becoming involved in rad­ical student politics. Carol’s first-hand experience of apartheid, working on a farm in a black rural area, exposed her to terrible poverty and violent conflict over land. She began researching the land question and partic­ularly the role of women in a rural economy. Colette, from a later generation, describes growing up in ‘a very woman-dominated home’, and living ‘a fairly close to the bone existence… My mother always was talking about the suffering and the complexity of the life of African women around us’ (Colette, gender, South Africa). Mosela grew up black under apartheid in South Africa. Her path into feminism included a failed marriage—‘there was lots of abuse and lots of philandering’—and encounters with race and gender theory in her postgraduate years in the US. Lerato grew up in a patriarchal family which groomed her for marriage and included elaborate bride wealth negotiation. The marriage didn’t last and the whole process caused Lerato to question and then study African gender norms. In most cases research was complemented by activism. Zubaida, for example, joined the African National Congress (ANC) underground while at university. Her anti-apartheid activism rapidly spread to an interest in women’s politics. Colette became involved in pro bono teaching in the townships. ‘I suppose I felt this immense sense of responsibility to finding 31

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

out what I could, and action’ (Colette, gender, South Africa). Lerato felt a ‘sense of duty’ to confront university management over its failure to act on issues of gender-based violence and rape on campus. The activist agenda influenced research, raising questions of who should be heard and which mediums could be used to expand the reach of femin­ism. Two feminist journals were launched: Speak (1982) aimed at providing a platform for women to write for ‘grassroots’ audiences, and Agenda (1987), which had a stronger academic orientation. Three big international conferences announced the arrival of gender studies in the 1990s. In 1990, the Lawyers for Human Rights held a conference on Women’s Rights in Johannesburg. In 1991 the first academic conference, the Women and Gender conference, was held at the University of Natal in Durban and this was followed by the Colloquium on Men and Masculinities in 1997, the first gendered conference in Africa focusing on masculinities. A further journal, Feminist Africa, was established in 2002. Numerous gender courses were established with a dedicated gender studies programme set up at the University of Natal in 1995, and the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town in 1996. Lerato describes the importance of these teaching programmes as ‘lighting the bulb for students, and students would come more and want to be involved’. South African gender studies developed new lines of enquiry that reflected the context of the country and the activism of its researchers. Lerato’s interest was in Zulu women and she wrestled with the question of ‘becoming a marriageable girl’. Her work engaged local debates about ‘culture’ while defending Zulu identities. The realisation that South African gender studies was not a clone of Northern scholarship was accompanied by a realistic sense of the need for, and importance of, international collaboration. For many, collabor­ation started with overseas study, in the UK and the US. Being connected to British or American researchers also provided easier access to funding. Local funding is not sufficient to fund large projects, but reliance on foreign funding always comes with dangers, and funders often have their own agendas, which— either consciously or unconsciously—are able to influence research agendas and determine what is worth knowing (Arnfred 2014). Overall, however, South African researchers sought collaboration but on terms of equality: I want to collaborate on my own terms. Obviously I want to understand where they are coming from but I would also like them to know that I’m not coming with a begging bowl (Mosala, gender, South Africa). 32

The New Domains of Knowledge

Gender studies in South Africa became well-established but this did not mean that it was united or without problems. A review of the editorial policy of the journal, Agenda, for example, argued: Our history of apartheid further marginalises black African women, especially those who reside and work in poorly resourced rural contexts. As such, Agenda is concerned with empowering women through encouraging and publishing research that takes seriously ‘issues of justice and power and [is] committed to uncovering and understanding the forces that cause and sustain oppression (Moletsane, Haysom and Reddy 2015: 771).

In other parts of Africa there is some suspicion about the dominance of South African writers in the domain of gender. ‘Western scholars have thus far conducted the bulk of studies on sexualities and a big chunk of what has been published on the African continent emanates from South Africa’ (Tamale 2011: 3). It is not clear whether Tamale and her collabor­ ators regard South African writers as non-African or as simply reprod­ ucing ‘Western feminism’, but she does warn: ‘The dominance of Western theories and perspectives on sexuality studies and the fact that the main languages of academia are colonial have serious implications for rapidly growing sexualities scholarship on the continent’ (Tamale 2011: 3). African feminism emerged to object to various aspects of Western feminism including its insensitivity to issues of race, class and sexuality, its universalising tendencies and its insistence on gender oppression as a central focus. As a result, African feminism has focussed on female agency and power and on the many roles that women have (Ahlberg and Kulani 2011).

The Knowledge Domain of HIV/AIDS The domain of HIV/AIDS research emerged in the early 1980s in response to the identification of the first cases of HIV/AIDS infection in New York and California. The first cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) and Kaposi’s Sarcoma (KS) identified among gay men in New York and California were reported in 1981. In 1982, the US government allocated USD5 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and USD10 million to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for AIDS research. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, the term ‘AIDS’ was officially adopted by the CDC in 1982, defined as ‘a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell-mediated immunity, 33

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occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease’. HIV/AIDS spread rapidly, especially in the US where by 1987, 47,022 of 71,751 cases of AIDS which had been reported to the WHO, were there. By early 1989 the figure had doubled, with 142,000 AIDS cases reported in 145 countries. AIDS was becoming a global disease but it was only in the 1990s that it ceased to be understood as primarily affecting gay men. In 1988, the WHO declared 1st December as the first World AIDS Day. The first publication identifying a retrovirus as the cause of AIDS was published in Science in 1983 by a group of scientists from the Pasteur Institute. Understood initially as primarily a disease that targeted gay men, it was only in the late 1980s that the full extent of the pandemic was recognised as it began to spread through heterosexual intercourse and drug usage (sharing of needles). Initially virologists were the main researchers, but as demonstrated in Chapter Four, their work was soon complemented by experts from epidemiology and public health as well as the social sciences and humanities. New disciplines were drawn into conversation as HIV became an increasingly pressing issue of public concern. Researchers often found themselves becoming advocates and doctors increasingly became researchers. The recognition of HIV/AIDS as a knowledge domain in its own right can be seen in the establishment of journals. In 1987 the journal AIDS, published by the International AIDS Society, was established. Two years later, in 1989, it was followed by AIDS Care. And, as evidence of the steady expansion of the domain to include social science perspectives, AIDS and Behavior, made its appearance in 1997.

The HIV/AIDS Knowledge Domain in Australia

The first AIDS cases were identified in Australia in 1982. Neal Blewett, formerly a professor of politics at Flinders University, was Minister of Health in Bob Hawke’s government from 1983 and he took immediate interest in the disease. He ‘genuinely believed that injecting drug users and sex workers and gay men needed to be there on the stage… as part of the what became the partnership’ (Jean, HIV, Australia). Describing Australia as ‘lucky’ to have had an open-minded Health Minister, Jean captures the spirit of the 1980s: ‘And it is that sense of government listening, genuinely listening to what the sex workers, the gay men and the drug users have to say. And then much more importantly perhaps is funding them to protect themselves. So the AIDS Councils I think were absolutely central’ (Jean, HIV, Australia). 34

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In Sydney, Australia’s centre of gay culture at the time, the gay community responded to the disease at an early stage, with veterans of Gay Liberation activism in the lead. The doctors who served the community also became their advocates. Australia was a global leader in prevention work in the second half of the 1980s. The federal government set up spec­ ific programmes on an emergency basis, including a free-standing agency to fund AIDS-related research which funded social science as well as biomedical science from the start. The first National HIV/AIDS Strategy was established in 1989. The elimination of transmission of the HIV virus and the minimisation of personal and social impact were its two stated aims. Research, and in particular scientific research, was seen as key: Research into the epidemic is essential to the management of the epidemic. Strategies must be guided by up-to-date knowledge of the epidemiology and mechanisms of pathogenesis (Commonwealth of Australia 1989: 24).

The domain was consolidated when the federal government provided longer term funding and invested in three national research centres in HIV research—the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (which became the Kirby Centre in 2011), the National Centre in HIV Social Research and the National Centre in HIV Virology Research (formed in 1986 and currently known as the Australian Centre for HIV and Hepatitis Virology Research). Simon, a gay activist from the 1970s, moved from Australia to New York in the early 1980s and found himself in the middle of the American epidemic. He reflects on the importance of timing: I was actually back in New York when AIDS first came along [and was] half by accident and half I think by design, in the right place in Australia when there started to be some connections with the international HIV world (Simon, HIV, Australia).

Richard was another who became involved in AIDS research as a result of activism. As with Simon, his entry was partly through the gay movement but particularly motivated by the death of a friend from AIDS in 1984 and by a desire to do something to help. The Australian government was quick to respond and Richard became employed in sex and AIDS education. Early on, Richard ‘decided I really ought to do something in terms of HIV, but I knew probably I was best to do some kind of research’. 35

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A different story is told by Peter who studied maths and biostatistics at Australian universities with extended periods of work and study in the US and Europe. During this time he became involved in cancer research and this provided an opportunity to become one of the first to get involved in early AIDS research in Australia in the late 1980s. ‘So I came back (from Europe) to basically a completely new area which was HIV, completely new set of things to do’ (Peter, HIV, Australia). State AIDS policy and support for research permitted ‘an extraordinarily close relationship with community but also with sex workers’ (Jean, HIV, Australia). Close collaboration between policymakers, researchers and affected groups, especially the gay community, came to be seen internationally as the distinctive Australian approach. Research agendas were influenced by those affected by HIV and these same people were involved with communicating research results: I think we have been very lucky and I think it is more than lucky, we have had very good public servants. I think the NSW Health Department whether Liberal or Labor over those years has been extraordinarily strong’ (Jean, HIV, Australia).

The result of activist, researcher and government involvement was the emergence of an interdisciplinary knowledge domain in which traditional discip­lines maintained their identity. Simon reflects on this development from two angles. He notes that the domain ‘always and usefully’ operated globally, with close collegial ties in different countries. This produced a diverse and rich research environment. But more recently he feels that the domain has become somewhat ossified. People are now ‘talking to themselves, now the AIDS industry is people talking to themselves but from much greater variety of backgrounds’ (Simon, HIV, Australia). From the start, the HIV/AIDS knowledge domain in Australia was closely tied to countries elsewhere (especially the US and Europe) which were experiencing similar challenges. Peter, who had worked in the US and Europe, was particularly aware of the dangers of re-inventing the wheel. ‘I would realise that somebody else was thinking in the same way in the US and I (would) reach out to someone who may be doing a similar thing’ (Peter, HIV, Australia). All the academic researchers in our study noted the importance of the conferences which brought researchers from all disciplines together. After working in the field for nine months, Peter returned to San Francisco. ‘It was very exciting, it was really you know just an explosion of ideas and 36

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things that we could and should do’ (Peter, HIV, Australia). Conference engagements were also a conduit for Australian researchers to be involved in WHO and UNAIDS forums where they fed in their ideas and participated in creating research agendas.

The HIV/AIDS Knowledge Domain in Brazil

HIV/AIDS emerged as a public issue in Brazil during the democratisation process in the 1980s, and this historical accident was crucial for shaping the knowledge domain. The first case was diagnosed in 1982 in the state of Sāo Paolo, where Franco Montoro from the Brazilian Movement for Democracy (MDB) would be elected governor, carrying the hopes of social movements and grassroots organisations. As with Australia and South Africa, activism played an important part in the growth of the Brazilian domain. Early on, independent social movements recognised the need for collective action. In 1983, gay rights groups such as Outra Coisa worked together with the Sāo Paulo State Secretary of Health to provide information on the epidemic. In 1986, ABIA (Interdisciplinary Brazilian Association of AIDS) was established. Its board was composed of activists, scholars and scholar-activists such as Richard Parker, an American anthropologist. ABIA provided information about HIV but also vigorously engaged in advocacy. NGOs put pressure on the federal government and contributed to a series of critical policy decis­ ions, including the designing of a national system in 1985 which established norms and regulations to deal with the disease, and crafted a formal system of epidemiological surveillance (Marques 2002). By 1990 Brazil was among the leading nations reporting cases of HIV/AIDS to the WHO (Daniel and Parker 1993). HIV remained a political issue and activism a critical part of contesting issues. The gay movement in particular mobilised much support. The sense of urgency was reflected in the Sāo Paolo gay parade, growing from 2,000 people in 1997, to 250,000 in 2001, to 2.5 million in 2005 (Correa and Jolly 2008: 31). Early in the pandemic, Brazil was connected to North American scholar­ ship most influentially via Richard Parker. Parker was one of the first anthropologists in 1987 to publish a peer-reviewed article on HIV in an anthropological journal. He built links between Brazilian social scientists and research on HIV, became involved with NGOs and helped to keep HIV/AIDS a key public issue in Brazil. Sidney, a researcher who worked with haemophiliacs, studied and worked with Parker in an NGO context. When he started his work ‘the 37

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AIDS “blaze” was beginning… the horror of that thing was in my head’. Working with Parker gave Sidney access to global networks which in turn led to successfully funded research collaborations with scholars in Europe. Similarly, for Franz, research collaboration with US scholars was crit­ical. ‘Whenever I had a chance to go to the United States I always went there… It was really a kind of apprenticeship’ (Franz, HIV, Brazil). Being part of a global HIV/AIDS research community helped Franz to influence the national research culture and in time he became a major figure in AIDS research in Brazil. As he gained experience and became established, Franz developed more independence from Northern ties and collaborations, although these continued to be critical for his work. Conceptions of transmission, primarily from North America, influenced enquiry in Brazil. The main conduit of transmission was believed to be via homosexual intercourse or blood transfusion, and there was initially uncertainty about the role of needle-injected drugs. One of the pioneer researchers who researched illicit drug use recounted: I started to see many sick people, this was in the mid-80s… practically nothing was known at the time about HIV with needle injection drug users, it was something null and void in the land (Franz, HIV, Brazil).

Brazil’s researchers were thus well-placed to expand the understanding of HIV transmission. In 1993, the World Bank signed a five-year agreement with Brazil to fight AIDS. Over USD160 million was granted and Brazil was obliged to contribute an additional $USD90 million. Funding was granted to NGOs and local organisations, and this became crucial for shaping the knowledge domain. Oppositional activism was replaced with a collaborative model involving international cooperation, government-based initiatives and NGOs projects (Ramos 2004). The growth of the domain was fuelled by pre-existing scholarship. Particularly important was previous research on sexuality. Since the 1970s researchers had been working with sexuality, mainly homosexuality, gay men and sex behaviour. The main sites for this kind of research were UNICAMP and the Social Medicine Institute in Rio de Janeiro. Similarly, the discipline of criminology contributed to understanding the pandemic because a major conduit of transmission was from illegal, needle-fed, drug use. There were also significant contributions from medicine and biology. In 1992 Brazil established a strategy for developing vaccines and new drugs, and FARMANGUINHOS—a laboratory associated with the Ministry 38

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of Health—led the way. Under the first Lula administration (2003–2006), FARMANGUINHOS acquired a large campus in the Western Zone of Rio de Janeiro, and under the second term of President Lula (2007–2010), led a national programme of ‘import substitution’. In 2001 a multidisciplinary centre (the Research Institute in Immunology) funded by CNPq was created. This gathered immunologists from various centres in Sāo Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Bahia and Sergipe, and focused on developing a vaccine for HIV. ‘Brazil was the first middle class country to launch universal access with an enormous basket of generics, no other country had this’ (Franz, HIV, Brazil). In 1996, Brazil became the first country to declare access to antiretroviral therapy as a universal human right (O’Connor et al. 2016: 3). By the turn of the twentyfirst century, Brazil’s National AIDS Programme had a reputation for being a ‘leading example of an integrated HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment program in a developing country’ (Berkman et al. 2005: 1162). While the domain is well-established, it is not all plain sailing. Sidney notes that funding has declined. ‘I think that ten years ago you had a pile of money, a pile of places for anything related to AIDS, this progressively was restricted’. Foreign funding, for example from US funders, is drying up because the focus has moved away from AIDS in the belief that the problem has nearly been ‘solved’. Just as worrying for Sidney is that AIDS has become a political football and the influence of NGOs has declined. ‘I think that things are going backward’ (Sidney, HIV, Brazil).

The HIV/AIDS Knowledge Domain in South Africa

The first case of AIDS was reported in South Africa in 1983. The number of cases grew steadily in at-risk populations, men who had sex with men, people who received blood transfusions and haemophiliacs. In the early 1990s a very rapid increase was noted in the heterosexual population (Schoub et al. 1990; Karim et al. 1992). As we shall see in Chapter Four, AIDS was largely considered a medical issue until the 1990s, with few scholars from economics, social science or the humanities studying it. But as the dimensions of the pandemic began to be realised, this changed dramatically (Karim and Karim 2005). By 2002, over five million people between the ages of 15 and 49 were HIV-infected (Karim and Karim 2005; Gouws and Karim 2005). By 2015, the HIV prevalence rate was 19.2 per cent. The rapidity of the spread of HIV in the country and the gravity of the disease led to a rise in research interest which drew in scholars from diverse disciplines. The pandemic soon 39

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came to be understood as having a strong gender element which in turn pointed to the centrality of sexual intercourse and gender inequality. Most of those infected in this period were from resource-poor households so the issue of poverty also entered the equation. As with Australia and Brazil, activism was a driver of research in South Africa, but unlike the first of these countries, a stubborn refusal of government to heed or work with social movements and scientists meant that a lot of research was driven by a sense of desperation and urgency. Under the Presidency of Thabo Mbeki (1999–2008), health policy failed to acknow­ ledge the link between HIV and AIDS, and questions were raised about the causative importance of heterosexual intercourse. As a result antiretroviral treatment was withheld, causing an estimated 350,000 deaths (Chigwedere et al. 2008). Researchers often brought political passion to their work. Jennifer, a trained medical doctor, was an anti-apartheid activist. She was influenced by ‘a kind of radical public health’ which emphasised community health. Once the ANC came to power in 1994 she had ‘entry points into the new government (and an) intense sympathy with the new post-apartheid state’. Wesley, also a trained doctor, came from an activist family. Training in the 1990s, he encountered HIV, ‘And it was a bit of a heart-sink experience’ he recalls, ‘there was almost nothing one could do’. Yet another doctor, Ruth, was a member of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement. During her elective year in the Mazimbu hospital, Tanzania, she encountered Percy, an ANC exile. He ‘declined incredibly fast’. Those dying, she reflected, ‘weren’t gay men, they were heterosexual men’ (Ruth, HIV/Gender, South Africa). In 1998 the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) was founded by Zackie Achmat, a former anti-apartheid activist. Gay and HIV positive, Achmat focussed his attention on challenging President Thabo Mbeki’s view that HIV did not cause AIDS, and on convincing the pharmaceutical industry to make antiretroviral drugs affordable. His organisation mobilised thousands of HIV positive (mostly black and female) people to demonstrate against the refusal of government to sanction and pay for antiretroviral medicines. This marked a key moment for many AIDS researchers who were desperate to slow the horrifying death rates of the disease and convince government their policies were wrong. In 2001, Jennifer began critiquing government policy. Her work explored ‘the idea of a dynamic being set up between state, civil society and researchers… and a set of moves and 40

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counter-moves’ that made things worse and deepened ‘the crisis at every point’. And this forced her to engage with the international literature and global debates and to point out that ‘South Africa isn’t this lovely exotic place anymore’ (Jennifer, HIV, South Africa). ‘AIDS denialism’, the name given to Mbeki’s ten years (1998–2008) of denying the link between HIV and heterosexual intercourse, and between HIV and AIDS, generated huge research interest. Apart from doctors who tackled denialism with science, economists began tackling the affordability of antiretroviral medicines and the costs of not providing drugs (measured in loss of productivity, and the costs of morbidity and mortality) (Whiteside and Sunter 2000; Nattrass 2007; Cullinan and Thom 2009). Social scientists were drawn to examine the conditions which gave rise to infections and in turn, proposed measures to reduce transmission, which included debating the government’s ABC (Abstain, be faithful, condomise) policy, and suggesting measures to complement reproductive health in institutions such as schools and hospitals. The number of HIV/AIDS research collaborations grew, often featuring a well-funded Northern team and an in situ South African team. Many had links with the London School of Tropical Health and Hygiene. One of the reasons was that many South Africans (including ANC cadres) were trained there. ‘It was the place where there was the biggest critical mass and the most innovative thinking around health policy and systems’ (Jennifer, HIV, South Africa). South Africa became a key site of research and began growing its local scientific expertise. ART (antiretroviral therapy) resulted from trials conducted with Asian, Latin American and African participants and invest­igators. The lead investigators of these and other trials were often located within South African research consortia such as CAPRISA, or HPTN052. Given the success of their research work, they have wielded decisive influence on the global response to the epidemic, including through the development of HIV treatment (WHO 2013). The application of these findings, including in World Health Organization guidelines, UNAIDS targets and numerous national HIV strategies, reveals their in­ fluence. Cindy comments that by the early 2000s ‘now we really are beginning to be equal partners and the collaborations are meaningful’ (Cindy, HIV, South Africa). It was in the context of these applied questions that South African AIDS researchers began to develop new lines of enquiry and ask new questions. Much of the work was community (rather than laboratory) based: 41

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER HIV drove us out into the community because this was a disease that was happening to so many ordinary folk in their place, community, that if we were going to have any impact at treatment level or even at prevention level, we would need to be [in the] community (Cindy, HIV, South Africa).

The establishment of the African Journal of AIDS Research (AJAR), which produced its first issue in 2002, announced the entrenchment of the HIV/ AIDS domain of knowledge. Local journals began to devote special issues to the pandemic. Charles Crothers guest edited a special issue on ‘Social Factors affecting HIV/AIDS in South Africa’ of the South African sociology journal, Society in Transition, in 2001. Carol Coombe guest edited a special issue on ‘HIV/AIDS in education’ in the journal Perspectives in Education (2002). The area studies journal, African Studies, had a special issue on ‘AIDS in Context’ in 2002, edited by Peter Delius and Liz Walker. A collective, comprising Debbie Epstein, Relebohile Moletsane, Robert Morrell and Elaine Unterhalter, guest edited the feminist journal, Agenda, devoted to ‘What kind of future can we make? Education, youth and HIV/ AIDS’. The same collective edited a special issue on ‘Gender and HIV/AIDS in Africa South of the Sahara: Interventions, Activism, Identities’ in the radical journal, Transformation. South Africa’s scientists still rely heavily on international funding but there are now often relations of mutual dependence. South Africa is currently third behind the US and the UK in AIDS publications (for more detail, see Chapter Four): We’re making an incredible contribution to the global knowledge bank here from South Africa—maybe not on the basic science side, I don’t think we can compete entirely on the basic science but certainly on the clinical research side we’re unparalleled. So we’re in a very powerful position to move into that whole position and actually call the shots (Cindy, HIV, South Africa).

The Knowledge Domain of Climate Change A convenient and conventional starting date for the recognition of a climate change knowledge domain would be 1988 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established. This is slightly misleading because the creation of the IPCC was an acknowledgement of 42

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increasing research evidence identifying the impact of human activity on climate patterns and had been pre-dated by such international events as the 1979 World Climate Conference. Nevertheless the establishment of the IPCC served to re-charge the domain, and unquestionably gave it impetus and cohesion. The work of post-war pioneers like Roger Revelle, Charles Keeling and Hans Seuss who studied carbon dioxide emissions laid the basis for a more purposeful examination of climate change and especially of modelling. From the late 1970s scientists began using approaches developed in meteorology to model and predict changes in climate. Amongst these were the American, James Hansen, based at Columbia University; Adelaide University-trained Australian, Tom Wigley; and Briton, Phil Jones. Using large data sets and sophisticated modelling, they contributed to debates about how rapidly climate change would occur, and what needed to be done to slow down such changes or develop strategies to mitigate or adapt to the effects. Their work ultimately contributed to the establishment of IPCC and to the policy debates that followed. The political companion of the IPCC has been the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), established in 1992. This produced a framework of international cooperation to tackle climate change and was behind the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 which sought to systematise a global response. These influential bodies set research agendas, funded research, acted to create networks and gave researchers profile. The UNFCCC has political muscle, whereas the IPCC is formally a body that assesses existing research—though in reality it is an actor in knowledge production as well (Hughes and Paterson 2017). From the outset, the establishment of the knowledge domain went handin-hand with activism. Scholars, alarmed at signs of global warming, frequently used public platforms to address an audience far broader that of their scholarly community. James Hansen, Columbia University Professor, for example, addressed the US congress in 1988 about the dangers of climate change and in later years ramped up his activism, being arrested in 2011 for protesting outside the White House.

The Climate Change Knowledge Domain in Australia

Australian scholars play an important role in international climate change research and in 2015 contributed the fifth most scientific publications to the domain (see Chapter Five, Table 1), behind the USA, China, the UK and Germany. National climate change research has been, until recently, 43

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well-funded by government. The country’s location makes it an important site for research. It is well-connected to Northern research networks, particularly insofar as modelling is concerned. In contrast with the HIV/AIDS and gender domains, Australian climate scientists are less activist, though some trace their interest in the domain to their concern for the environment (endangered species for example), and many are concerned to make a difference, primarily through education, communication and policy development. Just doing research for many isn’t enough. ‘I could sit here for the next 10 or 15 years… and I can publish… (but) is it going to make a difference… the answer is no’ (Flora, climate change, Australia). ‘It is very clear to me… that we can do as much science as we like and if it gets published in the journals that is great, but it is not going to make any difference to anything’ (Jacinta, climate change, Australia). Political involvement needs to be ‘pragmatic’ says Daniel (climate change, Australia), and a form of pragmatism has been involvement in IPCC work. Many Australians have been, and continue to be, involved in IPCC work: By far the biggest development was the formation of the IPCC… so the scientific community and governments together decided we needed to have a more coherent way of getting the scientific inform­ ation into the (public domain) (Marcus, climate change, Australia).

As with Brazil and South Africa, many Australian climate researchers studied overseas and in this way integrated themselves, their work and their colleagues into global networks. In the case of Dean, he was born and studied in the US and then worked for 15 years in a US university before coming to Australia to work on environmental justice. James, working in the Pacific islands, completed his postgrad work in the UK. Another of the early Australian scientists spent many years working in Sweden. What was key to the development of climate science was measurement. ‘It is really only the last 150–200 years that we have actually been able to measure things in situ… in the 1970s is where we actually saw that in observations’ (Alison, climate change, Australia). With measurement, the science of modelling took off. ‘These models are huge, they are like a mill­ion plus lines of code… they are not things that you could work out yourself on a piece of paper’ (Flora, climate change, Australia). On the social science side, a lot of disciplines came together. One of the pioneers in this stream describes this side of the domain: 44

The New Domains of Knowledge There are a wide range of issues and… (there are) fairly large networks of people working on them, and are fairly well organised, like earth systems governance or global governance, there are just a lot of people and you know really good and really interesting people that are tied together (Dean, climate change, Australia).

Much of Australia’s research occurs against a backdrop of government tactics and changing economic policies. In the 1980s, and under Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal (conservative) government, Australia moved away from the earlier policy of industrialisation, towards a reliance on primary exports into global markets. This gave enormous influence to big mining companies which funded the activities of climate change sceptics and supported pro-business politicians. Climate change generally, and coal mining in particular, became ‘a fraught and highly contested issue in Australian federal politics’ (Marcus, climate change, Australia). Some researchers became politically active, both at the grassroots and policy levels, and have been presented as protectors of the environment and the public. Initially researchers were able to influence government. ‘Governments started to take notice, because, actually, hold on a minute, if this is right and these projections are, well, what is going to happen in the future that could have dire consequences?’ (Alison, climate change, Australia). On the other hand, advocacy could give way to combat. The campaign to reduce carbon emissions focussed on the coal industry, with climate change researchers leading the argument against continuing coal mining. The discovery and invention of new, renewable energy sources have gone hand-in-hand with climate change research: They are already cheaper and… better and more robust and more resilient, more egalitarian, and they are much cleaner in terms of effect on the environment, and people are realising that, not just greenies, people of Western Sydney are [concerned about the climate] (Marcus, climate change, Australia).

When the climate-sceptic conservative leader Tony Abbott came to power (2013–2015), he dismantled the main advisory body and unravelled the carbon trading scheme. The Australian Climate Commission was disbanded, but public support via donations saw a Climate Council established, and this continues to make the case for measures to combat climate change. One of our interviewees, Flora, was a member of the Climate Commission and remembers her time ‘before we got sacked’, as very productive. ‘We 45

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went all over the country doing public forums, meeting business people, meeting councillors, meeting all sorts of community groups’. Her work had also included assisting with the distribution of biodiversity funds that were generated by the carbon price for biodiversity projects. In other words, there was a time when climate change researchers were participating actively in policy and implementation. But relations between government and researchers is now more adversarial, with government pushing a probusiness line that largely ignores climate change research. Climate change has become a source of public concern and this has contributed to curriculum change within Australian universities. Undergraduate and postgraduate programmes have been developed with corresponding course handbooks and materials drawing on the increase in research being generated by local, Australian, researchers. Many of the initiatives have been novel, not only because of their focus on climate change but because of their interdisciplinary nature. ‘I really do believe it is the way we have to go, because tackling these big environmental issues, you can’t do it from a single disciplinary perspective, so I think it is important’ (Jacinta, climate change, Australia). National research capacity in Australia has grown through national and state government funding as well as university funding. The National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) was established in 2008 to coordinate, fund and stimulate research. Its mission was to provide decision-makers with the ‘biophysical, social and economic inform­ ation needed… to manage the risks of climate change impacts, by leading the research community in a national interdisciplinary effort’ (https://www. nccarf.edu.au/nccarf). In the more recent period, however, government has slashed funding for climate change research (O’Donnell and Mummery 2017). As in South Africa, this knowledge domain contains not just tensions between different levels of operation and political purpose but also conflicts over what perspectives are represented. The indigenous land movement, for example, has brought awareness of local, Aboriginal understandings (Christie and Verran 2013), and shown how these often do not align with the ‘science’ of climate change research. Views about the place of indigenous knowledge in climate change work vary, but one researcher, Flora, described it as ‘a can of worms’—struggles over turf and who is allowed legitimately to access ‘indigenous knowledge’ (Flora, climate change, Australia). 46

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The Climate Change Knowledge Domain in Brazil

Climate change became a focus of research during the 1980s when democracy was slowly restored in the Brazil, and researchers began to convince government to become involved. ‘We went [to government, and explained] the gravity and the importance in terms of preparing the agenda for Rio 92’ (Bernardo, climate change, Brazil). Researchers convinced government to house climate change research in the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, according to Bernardo, the only country in the world to do so. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (‘Earth Summit’), the major global conference on the environment, took place in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (known in Brazil as ‘ECO-92’), and this marked a decade of growing research interest in climate change. It also marked the growth of a new democratic order with a liberal orientation that saw the country terminate its nuclear ambitions and adhere to the international nuclear weapons non-proliferation program. The strengthening of civil society through the 1980s and 1990s fed into a local green movement which amongst other issues took up ‘the Amazon’ (Viola 1998). There was great diversity within the movement, from pragmatic environmentalists to more combative social movements that highlighted social inequalities (Acselrad 2010). In the 1990s, two institutions began to stand out: the INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais) (National Institute for Space Research), which had existed since 1971, and COPPE, the latter a graduate program in engineering at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Some prominent Brazilian researchers were invited to develop reports for the IPCC at the beginning of the 90s, and they also began to specialise in consulting policymakers. This configuration of the domain of climate change in Brazil translated into the creation of the Centro CLIMA (Climate Centre) in 2000. This Centre, created with support of the Ministry of the Environment in the context of the graduate engineering program at UFRJ (COPPE), was responsible for the production of scientific articles, Master’s theses, doctoral dissertations and applied studies for various areas of public administration in Brazil. Brazilian researchers have generally been trained locally but often have international exposure at the postgraduate level. Igor, for instance, was introduced to issues of ‘climate variability’ by his lecturer in the mid-1970s, and then encouraged to continue his studies in the US. The connections he made in that country were to stand him in very good stead. He developed close collaborations because of a common interest in the Amazon. 47

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‘Actually, it was the Amazon which ended up getting me interested in climate change and also an intensification of international cooperation’ (Igor, climate change, Brazil). Igor rapidly became a key part of the focus on climate change in Brazil and led collaborations involving major global research players. Despite invaluable links and collaborations with scientists (especially from the US and UK), the results were not always happy: This business with NASA left in practice me and many other people in Brazil with a bitter feeling… Partially (we had) the feeling that we were working way too much and we were getting little in return. In USP we also had an experience with the Germans which left me… ‘hell, I will never cooperate with these guys again’ (Igor, climate change, Brazil).

Brazilian scientists have sometimes responded by asserting their autonomy. Igor remembers dealing with Americans and Europeans and saying: ‘“This is a Brazilian program, would you like to participate?” And it became a large international project, an internationally recognised one’. Their ability to dictate terms was limited by the availability of research funding so ‘we had to bluff a little in relation to Brazilian participation (funding availability)!’ (Igor, climate change, Brazil). Nevertheless Brazilian state and national organisations eventually provided funding with two particular institutions standing out. Brazilian scientists regard themselves, with ‘no sense of inferiority’, as foundational members of IPCC. This is despite the initial lack of resources, but is partly explained by the country’s early concern with renewable energy research. In 1975 PROALCOOL was established to decrease depend­ency on petroleum and stimulate the use of ethyl alcohol for automobile fuel (Leite and Leal 2007). Although pollution of the environment was not the principal concern, the program paved the way for research into the envir­ onment. The development of scientific expertise in environmental science thus preceded the development of the climate change domain. Brazilian scientists were invited to develop reports for the IPCC at the beginning of the 90s and continued to be heavily involved in IPCC writing and research thereafter. It took time before climate change became recognised as an autonomous knowledge domain. Bernardo remembers having to explain to national and international counterparts: ‘climate change was still for us like a hobby, because there wasn’t a professional engagement, research contracts, support, government financing’ (Bernardo, climate change, Brazil). 48

The New Domains of Knowledge

The domain of climate change studies is constituted mainly by engineers, physicists, biologists and meteorologists, with limited participation from social scientists. And yet the domain facilitates some disciplinary integration. Felipe for instance, trained in oceanography, completed his PhD in the late 1990s. His training was interdisciplinary and the influences on his understanding of his field were very broad. Felipe became interested in the social sciences, sociology and anthropology. Amongst the texts he cites as influential are those of the Hungarian Marxist, István Mészáros (based at Sussex University and associated with the Budapest School), and Georg Lukács. Another was Henri Acselrad, a Sorbonne-trained, Rio-based economist who was central to the development of the concept of environmental justice in Brazil. Commenting on the eclectic nature of intellectual debt, Felipe, argues ‘it breaks some paradigms and they go “what is this?” You show the other side of the story, right? So it is really good’ (Felipe, climate change, Brazil). The development of a critical mass of scholars has resulted in the establishment of both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at many Brazilian universities. Some of these are globally innovative—the study of mangrove swamps, for example, was initiated in Brazil as a marker of global warming. By the late 2000s, climate change as a domain was well-established yet dynamic, still subject to external challenges and internal movement. That it was so, was a result of many factors, but not least the contribution of local scientists. ‘I tip my hat to Bertha Becker because of her lucidity, her works’. She gave credibility to Brazilian climate change work and contributed to making ‘a very strong Brazilian team’ (Igor, climate change, Brazil). (Becker was a political geographer of the Amazon and a member of the Future Earth Transition team. She died in 2013).

The Climate Change Knowledge Domain in South Africa

In 1989, Cape Town hosted a conference of the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme (IGBP). A special issue of the South African Journal of Science followed in 1990. Its editorial identified a climate change research agenda for the country: To review available knowledge on global and regional change phenomena, within Southern African marine, terrestrial, atmospheric and hydrospheric systems through the presentation of interdisciplinary syntheses, and to evaluate the state of knowledge and predictive power of information on change phenomena affecting the subcontinent (Shackleton 1990: 317). 49

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South African scientists were drawn into climate change work. With one of our interviewees, involvement started in 1991 when NASA and the Max Planck Institute sought partners in South Africa and South America. ‘They really were looking for liaison coordination and logistics at the South African end, but there was no money to support that’. Local support (logistical and financial), was given by two national organisations, the CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), and the NRF (National Research Foundation), and this proved critical in fostering the domain. Another route into climate change scholarship was through undertaking postgraduate work overseas. Both Harold and Gretta did their PhDs in the UK, one at Cambridge the other at Oxford. Harold had already had some contact with local climate change research, but pursued overseas study as an opportunity for advancement. There was no ‘political drive to the choices’, he said. Others, like Gretta, were moved by local issues of development and poverty. She undertook field work in a small village which experienced flooding every year, and became very interested ‘in the fact that science can be used for the good of people more broadly and to help with developmental problems, just challenges that every day people were facing’ (Gretta, climate change, South Africa). In the post-apartheid period (after 1994), climate change was regarded as a ‘red herring’ (that is, irrelevant or even misleading), diverting attention from the immediate and pressing needs of the country. As one universitybased researcher put it: …how environmental sustainability is viewed in the political eco­ nomic sense [is] as being a very elitist white-driven, and if not white then certainly [a] middle class driven agenda, that’s not relevant to most of the population. When you have people who are below the breadline then environmental issues tend to take second place, and the argument and the data has not been one about how closely coupled those are… at least in the long term (Harold, climate change, South Africa).

Despite being part of a global research community, differences of emphasis mark North and South: A lot of the adaptation research in the well-resourced countries is coming from such a different starting point, where they are often pretty well-adapted to current climate, whereas we talk about the adaptation deficit but we actually are not well-adapted to current 50

The New Domains of Knowledge climate across Africa and many other countries (Gretta, climate change, South Africa).

This division is ‘not so much about where the authors are from but where the research is happening, that there is quite a strong divide’ (Gretta, climate change, South Africa). Adapting to climate change permits a development perspective. Deepening inequality and enduring poverty remain strong research drivers. Development objectives such as housing, water and edu­ c­ation, ‘have to be part of the research agenda and (we need to) look at them together’ (Gretta, climate change, South Africa). If Gretta and Harold, in different ways, wanted to contribute to climate change policy and implementation, the conditions which they encountered in South Africa were far more amenable than in the rest of Africa. Clayton, whose work focuses on the continent rather than just the sub-continent, sketched a grim picture: The conclusion is that the finances that climate change requires is far above what is available. Then in terms of the human resources, the requirements for climate change adaptation, mitigation, it far surpasses the available human capacity in the continent in all the sub-regions. Then when we come to infrastructure—there’s no infra­structure for climate change monitoring for instance, for veg­ e­tation change monitoring. So the situation is extremely depressing because climate change is there, it’s a reality, but in terms of dealing with it the capacity is absent (Clayton, climate change, South Africa).

Clayton’s mission is to lobby and educate: When it comes to climate change, public forest administrations don’t have the capacity to handle climate change, even though they’ve been forced to actually participate in climate change programmes— but they are not well-trained—because climate change, it has a very scientific basis by its nature, so people have to understand the science behind climate change in order to be able to know to deal with climate change (Clayton, climate change, South Africa).

There is a lot of opportunity and need for researchers to be involved in climate change politics. When Harold returned to South Africa in 2011 he contributed to climate change policy deliberation. There wasn’t ‘necessarily a very established group of people who could do that’. Gretta tells us that the need for input remains strong although there has been progress: 51

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER We’ve got lots of adaptation policy papers… but yet when it comes to really trying to reduce the vulnerability of the poorer households in South Africa so they don’t have to feel the impact of climate as severely as they do, I don’t think they’ve been prioritised (Gretta, climate change, South Africa).

The local approach to climate change has been to view it together with issues of inequality, asking that global debates not assume that the two are unconnected, nor that Northern interpretations of climate change are shared by the entire planet. Harald Winkler, a member of the IPCC since 2004, was recently successful in ensuring that issues of inequality (and not just poverty) were accepted by the IPCC as relevant to the climate change debate. It took time for the climate change domain to consolidate, but it has now become a mainstream concern. South African researchers alerted the public to changes and dangers and in turn were approached by government to offer practical advice on how to deal with what had hitherto been seen as a non-existent or only distantly visible threat. Amongst the scientists approached was Harald Winkler at the Energy Research Centre at the University of Cape Town. Together with his team, he edited a document for the Department of Environment Affairs and Tourism in 2007 sketching long-term mitigation scenarios around climate change (Winkler 2007).

Conclusion Researchers in the South frequently combine activism with research. They had and still have strong links to the North. For many these began with a period of study abroad, for most it involves forms of collaboration with Northern funders and researchers. These relationships are sometimes unequal and even parasitic, aligning with Hountondji’s view of extra­ version. But in these new domains, there has been more room for Southern researchers to use their expertise and location to swing the pendulum away from Northern dominance and towards more equal terms of engagement. In some cases, our Southern researchers claim parity with Northern researchers—even though they frequently admit they remain dependent on Northern research funding. Knowledge production in these domains is dynamic, and this is reflected not just by an increase in Southern productivity but also by the North looking to work more collaboratively with Southern partners. Contestations 52

The New Domains of Knowledge

over research—agendas, contents, concepts—are global, although each country experiences such divisions at the national level too. Points of friction can be traced back to colonial pasts, inequalities in resource allocation and status before the law, and in the struggle to use research for particular political and social ends. The commoditisation of research also impacts the way in which research is undertaken, who undertakes it, and for what purpose. If, in future, a canon in these three domains is accepted, it will not feature exclusively Northern texts nor reflect only Northern perspectives. Southern tier researchers have ensured Southern visibility.

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C H A P TE R TH R E E

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds In this chapter we focus on the daily lives of knowledge workers in Australia, Brazil and South Africa. We discuss the organisations in which they work and their labour practices, drawing on ethnographical material and the dozens of interviews collected during our research. The chapter starts with an exploration of ethnographical data collected in three particular institutions, focusing on their physical space, staff, funding schemes, hierarchies and cultures of work. The second section draws on interviews to analyse everyday practices of work, focusing on three key aspects: the effects of technological tools (emails, software programs and computers), on labour routines and research skills; the impact of global research networks on intellectual labour; and the challenges of writing. We combine our extended case studies - focused on key individual researchers - with extracts from the other interviews collected during our project. Finally, we close the chapter with a brief reflection about how extraversion affects the practices of knowledge workers in the global South. Our argument is that this concept must be reformulated to account for the creative strat­ egies developed by these researchers to cope with the unequal distribution of resources, prestige and wealth. Therefore, the original idea that local experts ‘adapt’ ideas and frameworks developed in the North is indeed true, though it is just part of the whole story, as local forces are also relevant in shaping knowledge practices.

Institutions and Knowledge Production from Below: Three Organisational Ethnographies The ethnographic data provides not only a rich and detailed account of the institutional differences between the three countries, but also reveals sim­ ilar challenges faced by knowledge workers in the global South. In South Africa and Australia, expert knowledge is mainly produced in prestigious public universities, partly dependent on student fees, which follow in the

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds

tradition of the British academy. This means that academic staff are under institution-specific contracts which specify the amount of time devoted to teaching and researching. Climbing the ladder in this anglophone universe traditionally meant moving via ad hominem promotion from the pos­ ition of lecturer to full professor. But higher education employment has changed dramatically in the last three decades, and although promotion is still desired, there are fewer secure ‘permanent’ positions, and a major challenge today is to convert a part-time contract or post-doctoral position into a more stable or tenured position. Both in Australia and South Africa, state funding cuts have increased dependence on external funding sources and resulted in academic staff having to work harder and forsake their former job security. Independent research centres are more likely to be soft-funded, though government agencies may give some core funding. In Brazil, most of the research on HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender is conducted in universities funded entirely by the state, with staff mostly comprised of civil servants with lifetime stability in their jobs. Universities are also relatively new in the country, as the first was established only in 1934 in the city of Sāo Paolo, as an initiative of regional elites in that state. Though soft-funding is already a reality for many research centres in Brazil, that is not the case for knowledge workers in the state universities, who are not required to ‘fund’ their own position. Despite historical differences, the dynamics between metropole and periphery shape the common institutional experiences in these three Southern tier countries. Possessing a doctoral degree in most disciplines has become a minimum requirement for academics. There is a hierarchy when it comes to the value of a doctorate, with prestigious Northern universities featuring prominently. In the last few decades the capacity of Southern universities to offer PhDs has grown and now it is not uncommon for academics to develop specialist knowledge locally, although Northern degrees still have undoubted cachet. International collaborations are common for knowledge workers in Australia, Brazil and South Africa, but complaints over unequal funding and authorship protocols abound in all three countries. Europe and North America are still the hegemons, and institutions in the South are eager to sign deals and agreements which bring additional funding, as well as prestige in international rankings. The stories we outline below are based on single institutions in each of these countries, but they all reveal how the daily lives of knowledge workers in the global South are dependent on 55

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particular national histories, whilst also being deeply affected by their shared position in the global periphery of knowledge.

The South African Ethnography

In South Africa, we studied a multi-disciplinary climate change research unit (hereafter identified simply as the ‘Climate Centre’), located within an environmental research centre at a South African university. The unit has between 25 to 30 members. The Climate Centre numbers about a dozen staff, and we interviewed ten of them, nine white and one black. The Centre operates on ‘soft money’, that is, through research grants and contracts. Funds come from various sources, including government bodies and private international foundations. The research undertaken responds to questions of climate change, with some of the contract research specifically commissioned to address local environmental problems. Staff come from different countries, although the director and his deputy are South Africans. Interdisciplinary backgrounds are common. The researchers graduated in various areas of knowledge, such as industrial eng­ ineering, architecture, political science, geography, energy and economics. One staff member hails from the UK where she studied civil engineering at the undergraduate level. After graduation she worked for a short period as an engineering sustainability consultant in a major city of the global North, which she describes as sparking an interest in energy supply and access, and its connections with climate change. The staff member became interested in issues of development, and eventually moved to South Africa. Researchers in the Climate Centre need to raise (or earn) their own salaries, and are not in formal academic positions, although they may teach at the host university. Some interviewees reported dissatisfaction with this situation, as they had little time to pursue their own research interests. However, others believe that the lack of a teaching load gives them more time to do research and develop their own agendas. The relationship between the Centre and the host university is delicate, because the university does not provide funding, nor does it reward Centre staff who are productive in research terms. On the other hand, the Centre benefits from being associated with the university. Organisational structure is described by researchers as ‘very horizontal’, and ‘not too hierarchical’. The director’s main task is to lead the organisation, promote its research to wider audiences and establish links with African governments and international donors. Researchers must undertake research and lead research projects, and groups can be formed according to 56

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the needs of specific projects. This dynamic gives individuals responsibility for their work-life balance and office hours. There is minimal surveillance and monitoring in the Centre, and this is regarded by researchers as a positive feature of their institution. Some interviewees reported that this autonomy allows them to work at home. However, some complained about the downside. The lack of close management may lead researchers to make poor decisions about selecting projects or starting initiatives, because management does not have strict control over the workloads of staff. One researcher stated that they may end up ‘doing four things badly instead of three things well’. The flat hierarchy is also labour intensive for researchers, because they must do considerable operational work, such as submitting invoices and dealing with the university’s financial system. The Centre is mostly oriented towards policymaking, and researchers are interested in producing material which may inform negotiators and pol­ icymakers. Therefore, most of the outcomes of the knowledge process are policy-oriented, which means researchers have less space to conduct ‘pure science’ projects or engage in writing that is not readily applicable to social problems or world issues. The individual interviews revealed mixed feelings about this. Brenda is a good example of a staff member with mixed feelings about the politics of knowledge. She has a PhD in political science, obtained from a university in the global North. When asked about her daily routines, she explained that she tries to reserve the morning for writing, because one of her greatest challenges is to find time for thinking without interruption. On a typical working day she will stay away from the office for the first few hours to get something written, a habit she picked up whilst writing her PhD. This is her ‘intellectual prime time’. She tries to continue with this routine until lunch time, after which she’s happy to talk to colleagues, go to meetings, and respond to emails. Her writing work consists of research papers, working papers, policy briefs, and ‘consulting-type reports’ for donors (the latter is work she may do in the afternoon, because it is ‘not the same intellectual space’). Brenda has recently been contemplating academic promotion and been disheartened to find that many of her publications will not ‘count’ because they were not peer-reviewed. The Centre aims to build capacity and knowledge in the South, helping developing countries to conduct their own research to inform their international obligations and negotiations. The research focus of the Centre is climate mitigation, an area of research and policy action concerned with the reduction of greenhouse gases through the use of more energy efficient 57

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technologies, for example, and is a popular strategy in the developing world to deal with issues of climate change.

The Brazilian Ethnography

In Brazil, we selected a small laboratory (hereafter called the ‘AIDS Centre’ to preserve anonymity) within a major federal institution located in Rio de Janeiro. This lab has been conducting research on HIV infection and drug abuse for quite some time, and is led by a senior researcher. At the time of the research, the core of the Centre was composed of four individuals, of which only the leader had a secure position as a public servant, while the others are graduate students or post-doc fellows on flexible contracts. The Centre gets its funding primarily from Brazilian agencies and the Brazilian government itself, but we were told that the level of bureaucracy and red tape is significant and impinges on the research efforts of its members. The AIDS Centre conducts research on the consumption of illegal drugs and HIV/AIDS infection among populations of drug users, and its leader is mainly oriented to the application and development of statistical models for the collection and analysis of data about health in general. At the time of our research, according to the team members interviewed, the Centre’s central group consisted of four: Franz, the senior figure and leader; his assistant researcher, Naila, who has recently completed her doctorate; a junior researcher, Cecília, doing a doctorate and supervised by Franz; and the administrative assistant, Nilmara. This however is only the central group. For specific projects, the Centre’s team expands enormously. One of the larger projects on drug abuse, for instance, had twenty-seven other centres involved, each with their own coordinators and interviewers. All these people were hired specifically for the project, though some were concurrently recruited for other projects. There were coordinators in twenty-seven states (all Brazilian states, in fact); recruiters, who were in charge of identifying crack users; interviewers, who conducted the interviews with crack users; and drivers from the host institution, who drove the team around the state of Rio. Recruiters were essentially people who could move easily in poor communities and violent neighbourhoods. Recruiters sometimes were helped by ‘articuladores’: informal personnel from the local area who facilitated access to troubled areas. Rather than technical skills, the articuladores had ‘street credibility’. Additionally there were professional staff in charge of conducting rapid HIV/ hepatitis tests. The hierarchy in the Centre is quite strict. Franz has responsibility for coordinating large research projects, and as a civil servant he must sign all 58

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expenses and invoices. Naila runs the projects on a daily basis, talking to researchers on the ground, writing reports and dealing with the everyday ‘practicalities’, which gives Franz enough time to negotiate funding and working space within his institution. This arrangement is mostly based on personal trust rather than formal procedures, though from an intellectual point of view, Naila is clearly subordinate to Franz, particularly because he was her research supervisor for almost ten years while she worked on her doctorate. Nilmara is an administrator who runs the financial operations, while Cecília is a junior scientific assistant. The Centre has limited physical space, and the four person team works in a single office with some computers and desks. In one of the interviews, Franz joked about the ‘struggle for space’, which is a definitive feature of institutional culture there. Much of his workload is devoted to meeting with other administrators and bureaucrats in order to guarantee better working conditions. Naila and Franz have the busiest routines. Franz starts to check his email early, around 6:30 am, while still at home, establishing a work agenda which begins around 8:00 am and can run until 5:00 pm. Nevertheless, one day per week, due to his voluntary work with drug users in a clinic in a nearby neighbourhood, this routine is changed. Franz has many tasks: he must write articles, supervise graduate students and post-docs, coordinate and manage large research projects, meet with other senior researchers (who also are institutional leaders in his institution) and establish international collaborations with foreign universities. These multiple tasks require not only scientific skills, but also management abilities. Naila’s routine differs little over the days, as she stays connected through email with the team from early morning until late at night, even when she claims she is not ‘working’. Daily routine in the Centre can be quite demanding, and Naila stated that both she and Franz have suffered from health problems as a result of work pressures. Once she had a gall bladder condition and the doctor advised her to stop doing stressful tasks, which forced her to change her routine by eating regular meals and avoiding work at home. Franz used to arrive at work at 6:00 am, before the cleaners, and regularly missed breakfast. On one occasion he fainted while at work and now operates according to a more sensible regime. The Centre has developed expertise in quantitative epidemiological methodologies, and Franz has been employing these methodologies since the 1980s when researching HIV infection among drug users. Most of 59

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these methods were developed at leading institutions in the USA and then brought to Brazil and ‘adapted’ to local conditions. Franz has regularly visited the USA since the 1980s. The Centre’s intellectual production is twofold. There is a stream of journal articles led by Franz which target an academic audience, and other more popular materials aimed at a wider audience, be it policymakers or even high school students. The journal articles usually present the cutting edge research done by the Centre’s team, while the other materials, such as text books, comics and policy papers offer the means to share information. Much of the publication strategy has been defined by agencies other than the laboratory itself, which means that the researchers do not have full control over the materials produced during the research process.

The Australian Ethnography

In Australia, we chose a gender research unit (hereafter referred to as the ‘Gender Unit’). The Unit is a partnership between the host university and a private foundation concerned with women’s issues. At the time of our research, the Gender Unit focused on lifestyle and obesity-related diseases affecting women. The current director took up the role less than a decade ago. Her position is partly funded by a private foundation, and her appointment marked a departure from the Unit’s early epidemiological focus, shifting towards women’s mental health and a more sociological view of health and illness. The funding for the Gender Unit is entirely grant-based. Only the director and her executive assistant are paid through the foundation, while the number of research staff is highly dependent on grants awarded. The director is named as Chief Investigator (CI) on nearly all Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants, reflecting the importance of her track record with respect to grant applications. Other staff are named as CIs on the Unit’s smaller grant proposals, a shared activity that assists individuals to build a research profile. Global public health issues are the focus of the Unir’s projects. Researchers secure funding both from the Australian government and international organisations, such as AusAID, which granted AUD51,491 to a project in 2013), and the World Health Organization (WHO) which granted (AUD16,230 to another project). Though the Gender Unit has been successful in securing funds and grants, this arrangement presents many challenges. The host university 60

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provides infrastructure and encouragement—along the lines offered to the South African Climate Centre—but if the Gender Unit fails to obtain funds from outside sources, it is not given financial support by the university. This grant-based funding regime affects employment conditions, as the staff contracts may last only six months, or two to three years. Staff members frequently need to seek additional or alternative work outside the Unit, an issue particularly impacting on women. This national trend reflects on-going gender inequality because, although women have entered Australian universities in greater numbers than ever before, their career progression is slower and they are over-represented in casual and short-term contract work (Marchant and Wallace 2013). The Unit has 11 staff members, 15 adjunct fellows, and 15 students. The majority of the staff and students are women, with one man currently on staff. The career histories of staff and students are quite varied, though psychology and public health figure prominently. The group’s education and training histories include: clinical psychology, nursing, biological sciences, pharmacy, sociology, gender studies, commerce and English literature. Reflecting changes in the broader field of medicine and health, higher degree students enrolled at the Unit are likely to have a Master’s degree in Public Health (MPH) as well as a qualification in psychology. The Unit’s staff work long hours. A number of individuals reported that ‘we are early starters’. Indeed the normal week begins with an 8.30 am staff meeting to set the agenda and plan for the week’s research. This meeting is about reviewing and planning, and it was described by one of the members of the staff as follows: What happened last week, where are we up to, who needs to be congratulated, what needs to be taken into account, what needs to be reflected on, and what are the plans for this week, who’s going to be doing what where. That takes half an hour, sometimes up to an hour. So that is how the week starts.

There are periods where the rhythm of work can be highly intensive, partic­ ularly when staff have to focus on writing grant proposals for the ARC and NHMRC. The drafts are usually circulated within the unit so everyone can contribute to the final text. This informal peer-review process may affect the daily activities of research carried out in the unit, and increase the general feeling of anxiety shared by many staff members. As staff incomes depend on securing short-term grants, insecurity is widespread. As one interviewee reported to our researchers: 61

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER I find it amazing that people work like this. And they’ve worked like this for, you know, years and years at a time. Because they don’t know when their next lot of funding will come, and whether or not they’ll be able to continue doing the job that they love.

Although the workloads are heavy, the plan of the office and physical proximity assist team-work, as students may easily and regularly contact their supervisors and other colleagues. The lunch break is convened by a senior member in the kitchen area, which presents a good opportunity for anyone to get in touch with colleagues and experience a sense of unity. It also allows staff to keep in touch with the Unit’s activities. The deep sense of colleg­ iality revealed in our interviews is especially helpful for younger scholars. ‘Trust’ is a key aspect of the Unit’s organisational culture, as there are lots of opportunities to exchange ideas and projects and many people feel safe to propose small projects which eventually become big initiatives supported by the director. Staff members talked about the collaborative approach in the Unit: The main thing about [the director’s] leadership, and obviously the people who work under her who support this vision, is that it’s very inclusive. So if you’re interested even just a little bit in a topic, you come on board, you get included on the grant application, you know. No matter what your little contribution might be there’s a place for you if you want it to be.

None of this is to imply that the Unit is free of conflict, or that all members are equally integrated. What it does imply is that the way the Unit has developed, perhaps especially the emotion work of mentoring and inclusiveness, has produced a resource for sustainability and productivity, a counter to the fragmentation and tension that the basic funding situation tends to produce.

Comparisons

The three research units have unique features that reveal broader patterns of knowledge-making in the institutions of the global South. The Gender Unit and Climate Centre are part of large universities but must attract soft money from other funding sources; while the AIDS Centre is a small unit within a very large, state-funded research centre. These different instit­ utional frameworks significantly affect knowledge production and the division of labour among the staff. 62

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As part of a major federal institution, the AIDS Centre is highly reg­ ulated and the amount of paperwork which must be done in order to comply with bureaucratic regulations is impressive. Franz, the senior scholar in charge of the unit, leads a very small regular team, and must supervise students, negotiate with funding agencies, conduct research, write scientific articles, deliver policy papers and pen dozens of reports. All the expenses must follow the accounting rules laid down by the Brazilian state and the institution itself, which makes the AIDS Centre a tiny part of a complic­ ated web of research centres within a massive institution. In the case of the Climate Centre, the director is the person in charge of establishing links with governments, potential donors and other players in the climate change domain, but he is not burdened with the amount of paper work done by Franz. The physical space occupied by each of the units reflects their diverse institutional arrangements. The AIDS Centre occupies an extraordinarily small physical space given the multiplicity of activities carried out within it. It covers various research areas set up for different purposes, but when we visited, Franz led us to a relatively small room with eight workstations basically concerned with statistical tools and data analysis related to public health. The Gender Unit’s office is open plan, with rows of desks housing higher degree research students, as well as research and administrative staff. Senior research staff and the director have modest offices adjoining the open plan spaces. The Unit has its own meeting rooms, which are used for various aspects of the team’s research. Adjoining the workspaces on the same floor is a large kitchen and lunch area shared by other university research centres. This structure is not very different from that of the Climate Centre in South Africa, which features individual offices on a long corridor. Both institutions also have kitchen facilities and lounge spaces, though the frequency of face-to-face interactions may vary. In the Gender Unit, people tend to meet during a shared lunch break, while in the Climate Centre staff can stay in their offices the whole day, often without meeting other colleagues. These differences in physical location influence their patterns of working. Students in the Gender Unit, for instance, usually go to the institution on a daily basis, while staff in the Climate Centre also report good attendance. In the case of the AIDS Centre, the leading researcher does a lot of work at home, especially when he is required to write articles or read a PhD thesis. Therefore, he relies heavily on email and Skype for keeping in touch with 63

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personnel. The PhD students who are part of the Centre do a lot of administrative work in order to keep the projects ‘running’. The Gender Unit and AIDS Centre have a more ‘scholarly’ quality. Both have PhD students working alongside senior members, while the Climate Centre is more policy-oriented, and its staff complain about the lack of time for more scientific endeavours. Though there are many differences, the precarious nature of their work is a common concern for staff in the three institutions. Even though the AIDS Centre is state-funded, PhD students are not civil servants and survive on scholarships. Once they graduate, they usually apply for a post-doc position while working in the laboratory assisting Franz with multiple projects. There are also flexible teams employed on a temporary basis. In the Climate Centre and the Gender Unit, staff are constantly on the lookout for new funding opportunities to generate money for their research work and salaries. In the Gender Unit, for instance, grants may be for as little as six months, though they may cover up to three years, so researchers often seek outside work. All three institutions are globally connected in multiple ways. In the AIDS Centre, a very common linkage involves sending PhD students from Brazil to leading institutions in the global North (mainly the US), where they are trained in state-of-the-art research methodologies. Franz, the senior researcher, has built strong links with Johns Hopkins and Columbia in the USA. The Climate Centre in South Africa also benefits from its close connection with the state. The Centre’s director is constantly travelling abroad informally representing his country. The Gender Unit is also connected to global discussions on gender and women’s issues, though the high costs of international travel are a barrier for most of its researchers. As in the Climate Centre, it is up to the director to ‘promote’ the unit at international conferences and multilateral organisations such as the World Health Organization. But interactions with the global economy of knowledge are not limited to physical mobility. In all three institutions, researchers are continuously reading international journals and ‘keeping up with the literature’ using dig­ ital tools. This is one of the knowledge practices most affected by Northern hegemony, for as we show in Chapter Five, most of these journals are high ranking outlets published by powerhouses such as Elsevier and Thomson. To take into account knowledge produced in the South involves a conscious effort by the researchers themselves, who have to actively investigate less well-known pieces of research and seek partnerships with other Southern 64

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researchers. The Climate Centre is probably a rare exception to this general trend, as some of the researchers exhibit a ‘Southern consciousness’ in their interviews and are knowledgeable about other Southern research. Globalisation also affects the composition of the workforce. The Climate Centre has an international workforce, with nearly half its positions occ­ upied by non-South Africans. In the case of the Gender Unit, most of its researchers are Australian, but they draw several PhD students from SouthEast Asia, a common feature of Australian universities. The AIDS Centre’s workforce is 100 per cent Brazilian, and this is characteristic of all research centres in Brazil. Two factors explain this lack of internationalisation, and both are related to language: a professor in a Brazilian university must teach in Portuguese and can only be ‘tenured’ after a complex public exam which requires an essay written in Portuguese. The organisational culture in each institution reflects broader global changes that affect knowledge production practices in the global South. The Climate Centre’s staff report a lack of surveillance and monitoring, and the Centre has a ‘flexible’ institutional culture which does not have heavy teaching workloads. However, the imperative to contribute to paid research ‘squeezes time’ and makes the production of peer-reviewed research diff­ icult. Contracts are flexible and researchers must apply for grants in order for their groups to continue to function. The Gender Unit’s culture is closer to the Climate Centre’s, as the working environments have a positive atmosphere and staff report practices of emotional support between colleagues. In both institutions, hierarchies are ‘flat’ and the daily routine is more flexible. This is not the case for the AIDS Centre, as the four interviewees report a routine of constant work which is partly self-imposed, and partly a response to external pressures. The AIDS Centre’s staff also write many policy papers which result from consultancies, an activity central to the Climate Centre. The organisational culture in the Climate Centre reflects its position as a research group working in a bureaucratic, state-funded institution. The next section explores how these different institutional frameworks affect the daily labour routines of knowledge workers in the Southern tier.

Labour Process How does one do research in the global South? This section offers some answers to this question by focusing on the objects, spaces and practices that structure the daily routines of knowledge workers. In the section ‘tools’, 65

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we analyse how new technologies of information shape the way workers conduct their research, analyse data, talk with their peers and search for information. In the ‘global spaces of labour’, we address how these new technologies engender new international networks that are entangled with the local spaces and institutions where these workers are situated. Finally, the section on ‘writing’ deals with communication practices and the strat­ egies researchers employ to navigate a complex scenario when one must write articles, policy papers, reports and other kinds of outputs. Time is also a key dimension of the labour process, so the sections also address how acceleration is shaping knowledge production. We are aware that labour processes in the South share important feat­ ures with global processes that have been shaping knowledge production in the most prestigious institutions of the North. After all, the pressure for publishing and the role of information technologies (ITs) are realities for knowledge workers worldwide. The outcomes of these global patterns can vary due to the unequal distribution of resources that shape the domains of knowledge. For instance, global rankings of universities have favoured articles oriented toward quantitative methodologies, which follow the model of the natural sciences (Collyer 2013). The hegemony of English as the language of global science has also changed the way scientists define the relevance of their work, as many differentiate between ‘local’ subjects (usually applied knowledge) and ‘global’ themes (theory as defined by the global North) (Lillis and Curry 2010).

Tools

Information technology profoundly shapes the labour practices of know­ ledge workers in all three domains in Australia, Brazil and South Africa. Scholarship on academic work (Connell and Wood 2002; Hassan 2011) has clearly demonstrated how emails, Skype and other tools have changed the way academics and other knowledge workers engage with their work, allowing for a greater circulation of data and organised knowledge while also increasing the workload and the possibility of managerial surveillance. In the global South, these resources are unevenly distributed, but when they are available for researchers, they engender powerful consequences. On the one hand they facilitate the integration of a global labour force, permitting workers of the South easy access to resources and collaborators. On the other they lock Southern workers into a system which they do not control and which has the capacity to control or dominate them. 66

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Digital technology makes it possible for Southern knowledge workers to read papers and articles from different parts of the world. It is regarded as an essential skill, and using on-line engines is common for all our interviewees. In this respect they differ little from knowledge workers the world over, although resources play a part in accessing information. Firewalls and subscriptions are more likely to negatively impact researchers working in resource-poor contexts, rendering certain data bases and resources unafford­able and thus inaccessible. In turn, not being able to make one’s work visible (which in many instances means paying a fee to a journal), unequally impacts Southern knowledge workers. The all important citation count depends on making research work available on-line, and this is often more difficult for Southern workers than for those in the better-resourced North. This is a feature of globalisation and Northern hegemony. All of the work performed by the knowledge workers we interviewed, involves the use of computers and software to locate relevant publications, write articles, analyse data and generate theoretical or empirical models. Computers are particularly valuable for analysing data and generating models in the domain of climate science, which presents huge challenges for scientists who aim at making long-term predictions while maintaining intellectual autonomy. This is evident for both Alison (climate change, Australia) and Felipe (climate change, Brazil), two researchers with different backgrounds working in two large universities. Alison is a climate scientist, specifically a mathematician involved in the computational modelling of the climate system. Her work is conducted at a large Australian university, in a teaching/research job. Alison was born in the global North, did her first degree and a Master’s there, and after grad­ uating, worked for several years at her country’s meteorological agency. She therefore has close knowledge of the government agencies crucial to climate data collection. Alison outlined a very detailed and knowledgeable picture of climate change modelling, which requires mastering sophisticated computer programming. According to Alison, these models are based on what she calls ‘process’ knowledge—that is, principles of physics that underlie all the reason­ing about how the climate behaves. These principles are expressed as equations, which provides common ground between the various models. The modellers then write computer programs that simulate a climate based on the physical principles, incorporating interactions among the variables. According to Alison, there are now about forty such models in the field, produced by different research centres, and with different degrees of 67

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overlap. In her current work, she uses about 20, and is clearly an expert in modelling methods. Though she has strong training in mathematics and modelling, she also has a conventional Popperian view of science. Alison is in no doubt about the priority of theory, specifically theory from physics, as the core of knowledge about climate. In her words: So this is the kind of process understanding is the fundamental basis of understanding the climate system… I mean, you can have observations, and you can have modelling, but if you don’t understand—well in fact you can’t really do modelling if you don’t understand what is going on.

‘To understand what is going on’ could also be a motto for Felipe, who is a marine biologist who undertook his undergraduate degree in the late 1980s in Rio de Janeiro, completing his graduate studies at a well-known university a decade later. Felipe also held a non-academic post during this period, as he joined the staff of an ecological reserve in the Southeast of Brazil. He soon developed an expertise in mangrove environments, both as a researcher and as a public administrator, and eventually became interested in predicting sea changes produced by climate change. Since his Master’s thesis, modelling has become a crucial aspect of his daily work: And I soon began to work on various things other than my dissertation. I did my dissertation on a theme which more recently we have gone back to due to carbon sequestration, which was the development of models to estimate biomass, right?

Felipe explained how he developed a pioneering model to predict sea change through working with a research team to patiently collect data from the same mangrove swamps. This work provided them with rich information for the development of a computer model. While Alison provided a sophisticated description of modelling techniques, Felipe argued that the most relevant part of his work, which only a local scientist with local knowledge could perform, is collecting data with method and persistence. In his words: When people think about having [a long] series, when they have ten years, we will have twenty! In other words, it is the time lost that cannot be reached. Right? So, it is something very important. And something (that can be done) with simple data. I will tell you, often people are worried about sophisticated equipment… I say 68

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds ‘more important or as important as this, is working with the simple data more deeply, in other words, data obtained with a ruler, with something. Science is done in the mind, right?’ And it is not simply pressing a button.

Despite working with models and computer science, both Felipe and Alison claimed that observation and good reasoning are the keys for every good climate change scientist. After many years as an experienced researcher, Felipe developed a critical perspective on his field and expressed the need for more social science knowledge, especially when one has to deal with environmental conflicts and social justice issues. Gretta (climate change, South Africa) undertook undergraduate edu­ cation in South Africa but studied for a PhD in climate variability and the politics of development in the global North. After returning to her home country, Gretta engaged in projects focusing on adaptation and the effects of climate change in African regions. Throughout her career, Gretta conducted projects requiring field work because she loved being ‘on the ground’. Her experiences with technology during research work began during her PhD, when she struggled to learn modelling. In her words: So my supervisor was quite interested in this agent-based modelling and when I started my PhD I went up to [names a major Northern city] to hang out with a whole lot of agent-based modellers where I tried to learn their agent-based modelling language, which meant sitting with computers and fighting them, and I thought that that was a bad idea that I spend my entire PhD trying to fight a computer if I did that—so I was very glad that I did not do that.

Gretta was able to be very successful in her chosen field even though she did not use modelling. She combined her political values, which were forged in South Africa, with strong research skills learned in the North, and this fusion boosted her work on adaptation and development. Other interviewees also stated that good skills in computer science are regarded as obligatory for researchers in the climate change domain. Dave (climate change, Australia), a scientist working in Australia, states: …it is all almost impossible now to do climate science without a background in maths or physics. It is almost impossible to be functional without the equivalent degree in computer science, you really do need some knowledge of chemistry, biochemistry and really 69

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER you want to know something important about chemistry in general. And so it is almost the integral of all sciences.

The use of IT in the labour process is not restricted to modelling. The ability to read papers and articles from different parts of the world is regarded as an essential skill for scientists in the global South, and using on-line search engines is quite common for all of our interviewees. In fact, this practice is crucial for knowledge workers in the South, who have to be able to ‘catch up’ with the international scholarship on their areas and make themselves ‘global’ at the same time. The amount of literature available makes it difficult for researchers to deal with on a daily basis, so they have to come up with various strategies. Sidney (HIV, Brazil) is an expert in social medicine and public health and an exper­ ienced HIV/AIDS researcher in a large state-funded Brazilian university. Despite his training as a physician, Sidney has had a long-standing interest in the relations between science, philosophy and medicine, which led him to read theories and authors from the field of the social sciences, such as Canguilhem and Foucault. Reading a variety of sources such as articles, theses and books was always a key aspect of his labour process, something requiring an intelligent use of references. Sidney employed an interesting metaphor to describe how the internet demands an intelligent reading: I ‘search’. I am often searching for something, you understand? But it is not something of habitually reading a certain journal, I am always looking for something, and so everything comes. I mean, you throw out the net and you have to select.

Using fishing as a metaphor for the practice of reading seems quite approp­ riate for Sidney, as he is constantly selecting relevant information about medicine, politics and public health. This never-ending reading can be quite overwhelming, as the amount of available information makes it hard to read slowly. In Sidney’s own words: …because I see lots of things on the internet, I leave the tab open on Firefox, right. My Firefox is configured so that after I exit it, when I come back I open them as well, so there are 20 windows open of things that I have seen, which I want to write about, but I have not had time yet. I am waiting to see if things calm down a bit.

It is interesting to notice that this enormous reading workload is mostly oriented towards the global North. Though Sidney has been involved in 70

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projects from different areas and regions of the world, his daily readings are very much theoretical references from the established global centres of knowledge. In his words: So, there are four or five (blogs), which [include] some things about US politics, which unfortunately end up being relevant, some things about technology, and one guy in particular who is a biology professor from the United States, who talks about, who has a discussion about atheism, which interests me too, PZ Myers.

But how does this kind of on-line reading play out in the case of anglophone knowledge workers? Anton (HIV, South Africa) came from the UK in the mid-2000s to an important HIV research centre in South Africa after an educational background in economics and social sciences. He is not in a full academic position, and most of his research is self-funded and oriented towards intervention, which means that Anton is constantly writing papers and running projects. As a young scholar in HIV who also became involved in Left-wing politics, Anton delved into literature from the global South, such as the works of Paulo Freire, and developed a critical perspective on North-South intellect­ual relations. However, when it comes to how Anton reads articles, he is also Northern oriented. He tells us: In terms of journals, I go for all the American ones: I get AIDS, I get PLOS Medicine, PLOS, Gender and Development. I do get AJAR as well but mainly those—AIDS Care is a big one I get, and regularly Global Public Health. And then in terms of books, I think I’m slightly better at buying more South African as well as more global ones— there’s a huge collaboration but it’s on topics, so trying to find books which are more on South Africa in that you end up reading more South African ones.

Global Spaces of Labour

Information technologies have also greatly extended the working environment by allowing international collaborations to be conducted on a more reg­ ular basis. Reading the so-called ‘international scholarship’ is just one aspect of these global connections. Leaving the country to take part in international conferences is another way to maintain links with former colleagues and improve scientific networks, an activity that is a regular and essential aspect of the labour routine for experienced knowledge workers in the South. 71

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A common trajectory for Southern researchers used to involve a PhD in a prestigious institution in the North followed by a role as an institutionbuilder back home. This means that once these researchers returned from their period abroad, they started to apply for funding and resources to build their research profiles—which in most instances involves collabor­ ation and networking. The network built in their formative period must be constantly cultivated, as these grant access to global arenas, joint partnerships and funding. This pattern of international mobility has long been an issue within the academic community, and the most relevant scholarship highlights the danger of unequal partnerships, which may result in networks that reinforce the prominence of Northern science over Southern agendas (Gaillard 1994). In an earlier study of Australian knowledge workers, Connell and Wood (2002) analysed how the centre-periphery struct­ ure shaped the internationalisation of science by reinforcing the hegemony of the global North. International collaborations are carried out within an unequal structure, but knowledge workers in the South sometimes manage to manoeuvre around this structure in order to develop new institutions and practices. Our case studies shed some light on these issues. Augusto (climate change, Brazil), for instance, is an economist with a background in engineering and he works on climate science in one of the main state universities in Brazil. He travelled to the global North for his PhD during the 1980s, returning to a post in a prestigious public think tank in Brazil. At a time when the ‘climate change’ agenda was still gaining traction in the country, Augusto took part in projects on energy, sanitation and other areas which required applied social science expertise. Augusto’s original ties with a senior figure in the global North gave him the opportunity to take part in the IPCC and other international partnerships in the climate change domain in the early 1990s. He even remembered being called ‘my South American environmental economist’ by a renowned figure. In Augusto’s own words: A window of opportunity which I had, because of my supervisor, who was ‘the guy’ at the time, which was also a window of opportunity, because Thatcher resolved to embrace this area… Every month I travelled to meetings in the UN, the UN, the UN… Participating in all sorts of committees.

These international connections helped Augusto to draw significant funding from international agencies and form research groups in Brazil. In fact, he succeeded in pressing his own agenda within public institutions in 72

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Brazil by using his international ties as leverage. This complex entanglement between the ‘international’ and the ‘national’ resulted in interesting disputes, as global agendas on climate change have sometimes been challenged by local interests in Brazil. The IPCC is a major hub for global connections within the climate change domain. Across the Southern tier, many knowledge workers take part in its panels, which bring together people from diverse areas of expertise. Taking part in one of its panels is definitely a signal of prestige, but it also presents new challenges for scientists who must cope with a variety of demands that are unusual in academia. Flora (climate change, Australia) is an Australian biologist who ventured into the climate change domain quite early (in the late 1980s), and eventually rose to a senior position in her university. Flora’s interest in climate has changed over time. She has worked on the effects of elevated CO2, but except for her continuing this work with a few students, has largely moved on from this. Flora’s more recent interest is in modelling species distribution under changed climate conditions. Flora’s trajectory has opened up a tremendous number of opportunities ‘outside the strict academic role’. This includes contributing to Australian and New Zealand chapters for the fourth and fifth IPCC Assessment Reports. Flora has been on a number of government advisory boards addressing species protection and/or climate change. These include: a State scientific committee concerned with endangered species; a fund distributing biodiversity grants; and a national climate change body of experts. Flora is also one of a small group of scientists who have formed an advocacy NGO, and sits on the board of another major NGO. Flora described being drawn into public life as a ‘snowballing effect’ of doing lots of public lectures for different groups. In a single year she gave nearly 30 public lectures. However, she is quite frightened by the public reception of her work and claims she avoids reading things about herself on the internet. Despite the huge amount of work she is involved in, there is no great connection between Flora’s contribution to the IPCC and her academic work. The HIV/AIDS domain also has global networks which may affect the labour routines of knowledge workers in the South. This is due to the fact that as a global epidemic, HIV/AIDS is best addressed through large local, national or regional projects conducted in conjunction with transnational institutions. Wesley (HIV, South Africa) is a South African researcher trained as a doctor in the late apartheid period. He currently works in a university. His experience working with HIV/AIDS gave him many 73

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opportunities to engage in global collaborations, which eventually led him to understand how a ‘global domain’ emerged: HIV, this world, is so rich with research activity. As I say, some of my colleagues, very well-established northern academics working in this kind of… epidemiology world, they’ll spend an entire year at conferences; there is a big Korean meeting in February and there’s a cohorts workshop in March, and there’s always an international HIV conference in about June, July. And there’s a European AIDS conference and then there’s the Glasgow therapeutics conference, and then there’s a TB conference. And that’s without consultations and meetings and stuff. And many of those people go to all of those every year.

Wesley tells us that he has been part of many different international pro­ jects, and these have led to a high number of co-authored papers. However, an unequal division of intellectual labour often gives Northern scientists a greater role in these collaborations. Wesley once took part in an inter­ national project in which all principal investigators (PIs) were from the global North, a situation which eventually changed only after strong criticism from South African scientists. New technologies of communication allow for greater international collab­oration, but they have also had other consequences. It can be said that these technologies amplify the space of the researcher while increasing administrative demands and therefore continuously diminishing their time for research work. Therefore, it is perfectly possible for a researcher to work every day in a small physical space and yet be connected to a much larger space of interaction at the same time. As a result, work has become more intense, and is done during different periods of the week. Knowledge workers are not just working longer hours, checking emails early in the morning or reading papers during weekends, they are also putting more energy into what they do to deal with multi-tasking (De Meis et al 2003; Munch 2014; Vostal 2015). This ‘spatial amplification’ can also increase positive interactions, something which is especially true for younger scholars who engage with social media. Marina (gender, Australia), a mid-career researcher of sexuality in Australia, uses Twitter to communicate with her students while commuting to work and is a regular presence on Facebook, something which is less common among senior knowledge producers interviewed for our research. Maria (gender, Brazil), who works in a public institution in the far South 74

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of Brazil, uses a similar strategy to Marina, employing Facebook to engage with transgender activism and students as well, which she says allows her to do more political work. The concept of ‘digital scholarship’ has emerged in the literature to explore how new technologies of information have changed the way scholars work, by promoting new forms of storing and analysing data and fostering connectivity among global communities of scientists (Weller 2011). However, scholars may use digital tools in many different ways with different results, and there is still a lack of knowledge about how to use social media to better communicate with different audiences (Carrigan 2016). Some of our younger interviewees, such as Marina and Maria, have already noticed the potential for social media to broaden their spaces of inter­ action, but most of our respondents claim that the pressure for publishing and the intensification of labour prevent them from exploring these new tools. That is why universities in the global North are creating new metrics to evaluate the ‘digital presence’ of scholars in social media and take this into consideration in tenure processes (Weller 2012). In the South, where digital inequality is still a big issue even among knowledge workers, this is a less common practice. In the case of South Africa, the National Research Foundation asks scientists to demonstrate the impact of their work, and the major impact measurement is bibliometric, though tweets and policy impacts are also taken into account. In the case of Brazil, publication in top ranking journals is the major factor for evaluating researchers, and impact factors are mostly used in the natural sciences. In the humanities, committees are inclined to assess the merits of journals through qualitative review. Tweets and blogs are definitely not taken into account. Gretta (climate change, South Africa) undertook undergraduate edu­ cation in South Africa but studied for a PhD in climate variability and the politics of development in the global North. After returning to her home country, Gretta engaged in projects focusing on adaptation and the effects of climate change in African regions. Throughout her career, Gretta conducted projects requiring field work because she loved being ‘on the ground’. Her experiences with technology during research work began during her PhD, when she struggled to learn modelling. In her words: So my supervisor was quite interested in this agent-based modelling and when I started my PhD I went up to [names a major Northern city] to hang out with a whole lot of agent-based modellers where I tried to learn their agent-based modelling language, which meant 75

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER sitting with computers and fighting them, and I thought that that was a bad idea that I spend my entire PhD trying to fight a computer if I did that—so I was very glad that I did not do that.

Gretta was able to be very successful in her chosen field even though she did not use modelling. She combined her political values, which were forged in South Africa, with strong research skills learned in the North, and this fusion boosted her work on adaptation and development.

Writing

Writing is also a key aspect of labour routines for knowledge workers in the South and is likewise deeply affected by new technologies of information and global arenas of knowledge. Take for instance James (climate change, Australia), a geographer who works in an Australian regional university on climate change. Being trained in the global North during the 1980s, James first held a short-term position, and later took up a more secure position at another regional university. It was in this capacity that he encountered the developing world of climate change science, as he was sent by the local government to meetings in the very early days of IPCC. He has continued to be nominated for this role for more than twenty years, including being in the Working Group 1 sub-group focusing on sea-level rise in the latest IPCC report. Since his PhD James has had a specific interest in long-term changes in land form, which includes long-term climate change issues; so he was well positioned when the issue finally crystallised in the inter­ national arena. In the interview, James explained his participation in one of the IPCC’s panels. Members met four times, in four different countries, three to four days at a time, working on a series of drafts and employing lots of video conferencing—a difficult thing to organise because of the time differences across Australia and between Australia and other countries. The task was to summarise and assess the state of knowledge, not to engage with primary data production or analysis. The group was multi-disciplinary, including modellers. There were two ‘coordinating lead authors’ and James expressed mixed feelings about the outcome of this collective entrepreneurship: …basically we sat down and we went through what we wanted to write, we went through the structure, and there was a lot of backwards and forwards, no-one’s voice was suppressed. I found it a very stimulating experience. Sorry, that is not meant to sound like a platitude—stimulating in the sense that I didn’t consider myself to 76

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds be squarely an expert in that particular field, in the science of sealevel change. I knew a lot about it, different elements of it. But if you look at our chapter now, the chapter that we produced at the end of this, it is about just over 100 pages long. Probably about 20 of those pages, a fifth of the chapter, is what I felt comfortable with at the outset knowing.

James’ recognition in his field of expertise and his senior position allow him to be more critical of this type of writing process: I think it is unusual yes, yeah I look at all the people that I was on the IPCC Chapter with. And they publish huge amounts, more than I do, but it’s almost all with multiple authors. Whereas you know probably half of my publications over the last three years have been single authored.

[At this point, the interviewer comments on institutions and research teams:] And I think people are writing less creatively, less imaginatively. They are writing I suppose more conservatively. I always think that there is room for some speculation, I wouldn’t call it speculation, sort of conjecture or something like that, at the end of most academic papers. And I find less and less of that in those kinds of institutionalised outputs that you are talking about.

Our interviews revealed that attitudes toward writing may vary, partly as a result of disciplinary traditions. Generally speaking, researchers with a humanities background are more willing to praise authorship, style and precision than those trained in the natural sciences. Ellen (HIV, South Africa), for example, is a senior scholar who was educated mainly in the global North, where she lived for quite a while and became involved in Left-wing politics. During the 1990s, she moved back to South Africa, her home country, and worked on various gender projects and policy initiatives. Ellen’s trajectory began with an intellectual family background and later combined activism and scholarship. In the global North, she developed strong links with the British tradition of cultural studies, and this melting pot of influences shaped a very humanistic sensibility, which is quite common for senior scholars and activists who work in the gender domain. Her views on the writing process appear several times during her interview, and she stated: 77

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER I’m very taken with [name] these days because she’s got a lovely way of writing. I like people who can write well; I like reading stuff where people can write well—so I love Freud because his writing is so beautiful. And even when I disagree with him I love him.

For Ellen, this kind of writing process is directly connected to activism, something that she learned when working in the global North in a prestig­ ious cultural studies centre, within which there was a tradition of collect­ ive writing and co-authored books. This style of writing seems quite old fashioned when faced with the reality of the global arenas of knowledge discussed in this book. Knowledge workers who live and work in Australia, Brazil and South Africa are under great pressure to publish in ‘top’ journals. However, most of these journals are published in the global North and follow Northern models of scientific relevance and ‘good science’ (Collyer 2016). Peter (HIV, Australia), a leading figure in the Australian HIV/AIDS domain, complained about the construction of ‘relevance’ by Northern journals: If you send them something about Aboriginal health, even if it is about very high rates of disease and what you are trying to do to prevent it, they will say, ‘Oh, this is local regional journal’. You suddenly realise how North-centric and big-country-centric and US-centric the journals really are. It is incredible.

This is a shared concern among our interviewees. Wesley (HIV, South Africa), who works in South Africa, describes the process of publishing findings from a study on cost effectiveness of treatment in the following words: And in fact the experience of publishing the cost effectiveness study and the [mentions another study] study was hard—they were both extremely difficult to publish because we were met without having any Northern authors leading new studies. We were met with huge scepticism by reviewers. The AIDS piece on the outcomes, I must admit it was three or four journals before it was accepted by AIDS and even AIDS we had to appeal twice before they accepted it—because people just didn’t believe that there wasn’t something wrong about the outcomes and that they were as they were and genuinely believed that a large part of the reasoning for that was that it was published purely by non-established academics or academics who were entirely based in our setting [in South Africa]. 78

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In the case of Brazilian researchers, publishing in top English-language journals, it is an even greater challenge, because of the language barriers. Franz (HIV, Brazil) is a senior scholar who has a considerable training in epidemiology and currently coordinates large research projects in a prestig­ ious scientific institution. As someone who has been involved in inter­ national collaborations since the second half of the 1980s, Franz developed a broad perspective about the global arena of HIV knowledge at a very early stage, which gave him many opportunities to publish. In this period, he developed strong links with a US-based scientist who was a leading figure on the field. This North-South collaboration also shaped Franz’ skills in writing in English, which required great effort: I had worked at the university during my studies as a translator, so I had a certain facility for writing. I got a lot of the technical terms wrong. I think [name removed] corrected me a million times [laughter]. After this correction I started to really write in English. Funny, today there are some things that I write better in English than in Portuguese. Very specific terms I started to write better in English. But until I got all this jargon down I suffered a lot.

Franz adopts a twofold strategy which is not unusual for leading scholars in the three countries: the cutting edge pieces are sent to top ranking journals in the North, while the more ‘regular’ papers or literature reviews are published in local journals. This strategy reinforces a dual publishing market, which separates ‘international science’ and international scientists from so-called ‘local specialists’, who may publish in Portuguese or Spanish (Beigel 2014). It is important to notice that the labour of writing is not restricted to papers, books or journals articles. Researchers engage with writing in multiple forms throughout their labour routines, from constructing academic texts to writing reports, grant proposals or elaborate emails for colleagues. Much of this writing is conducted with other people, and involves a ‘lot of backwards and forwards’, as James described it. Writing also involves a quite delicate balance between time for writing and time for other activities. Cindy (HIV, South Africa), who runs an important HIV/AIDS research centre in South Africa, explained that staff who work there must multi-task and that can be quite hard. In her own words: And I say to people this is the hardest [thing] you will learn, is how you will balance your implementation, your paper writing and your 79

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER grant writing all at the same time. And you get to do it here because you get thrown in the deep end and you have to do it to survive because we’re all in the same boat and the boat is dependent on us all.

However, the growing acceleration of academic life, and the constraints that come along with this, have deeply affected this delicate balance. Rafael (HIV, Brazil) is a senior scholar on sexuality and HIV with a strong background in the social sciences and anthropology. Rafael has authored many pioneering works on sexuality and disease and been involved in research projects funded by major global agencies. He is currently a professor in a prestigious faculty of social medicine in Brazil, where he is in charge of supervising PhDs and conducting research about the history of diseases and human sexuality. Rafael explained that international collaborations require considerable work to maintain, and that his role as a leading researcher ‘robs’ him of time to write. In addition, collaborations pose serious questions about authorship, questions which are delicate in the human sciences more broadly. But the main problem he sees now is the lack of craftwork in science writing: When I was in university, at the end of the 1970s, and in some way I got interested, I was seduced by the university career, the model for intellectual work was craftwork. It was not an industry. This called me. You had time for reflection. Now it has become an industry. Because it is this, you have to publish regularly. So you can publish Das Kapital in one year and if in the following year you publish nothing you have [a] problem. The time for reflection, for me, is something else.

Concluding Remarks: Extraversion and Labour With a few exceptions, the work of our interviewees is mix of teaching, administration and research, a familiar global pattern. Their research labour usually centres on collecting and analysing data, preceded by grant applications and the recruitment of colleagues and research staff, and followed by writing for journals, conferences and books, sometimes mass media or popular education. Our respondents have learned to weave these jobs together, often running several agendas at a time and writing multiple papers every year. How is this labour affected by their location in the Southern tier? The post-colonial literature has identified a common pattern that Alatas (2003) 80

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calls ‘academic dependency’. In an important statement Hountondji (1995) speaks of the difference in scientific work between the metropole and periphery in ‘fundamental attitudes and operational modes’. He uses the term ‘extraversion’ to name the practical ways knowledge workers in the periphery are oriented to, and dependent on, the institutions, concepts and techniques of the metropole. Our data confirms the importance of this pattern, but also allows us to reformulate the concept. We believe that know­ledge workers in both the North and the South are situated in an international division of labour which concentrates prestige, resources and the sources for publishing in the global North. By taking very seriously the var­ ious strategies Southern workers develop to cope with this complex sit­uation, we extend the concept of extraversion. Rather than simply a description of how the periphery ‘mimics’ the centre, we suggest extraversion might best refer to the very complex (and sometimes contradictory) process in which knowledge workers actively deal with subordination. Our respondents frequently refer to Europe or the USA as the site of key ideas, accepted methods, and the most advanced knowledge. That is where ‘the big debates’ are happening, according to Anton (HIV, South Africa). ‘They are our fathers’, remarks Franz (HIV, Brazil), about the pioneering US researchers in his field. Peter remembers his student days in the global North: I had actually met some very high powered people in the [discipline] area including two people that actually became, it was actually just like that they come through, and I met two of those who actually were the leading [discipline] in the world of that era. And they were both again very supportive, very supportive mentors.

This global division of intellectual labour is also noted by Gretta (HIV, South Africa) when discussing her own PhD and the papers published from it. Though she recognises Northern hegemony, Gretta calls attention to Southern scientists who are developing their own knowledge without necessarily looking towards the North for reference: Quite a few of the theoretical concepts for those kinds of papers came from the North, but a lot of the applied stuff on seasonal forecasts was from southern Africa.

This division is found in all three domains of knowledge. Climate researchers get their modelling frameworks from the metropole. The HIV/AIDS 81

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researchers get their virology and epidemiological techniques from there also. In gender studies the influence is more diffuse but still pervasive. Carol (gender, South Africa) describes her intellectual formation through reading the British canon of Marxist feminism, mentioning Juliet Mitchell, Michèle Barrett and Sheila Rowbotham, while the Brazilian respondents are rather more likely to refer to French thinkers. With many respondents, the importation of theory and method from the metropole is a taken-for-granted intellectual practice. In the natural sciences it is supported by belief in the universal applicability of scientific laws, an assumption built into practices such as computer-based modelling. Alison (climate change, Australia) notes this when describing how different models were developed: …these have all been developed independently—not 100 per cent independently, because obviously they are based on the laws of physics, which don’t change for a lot of things. So now there is bits of equations and climate code that are common to all of them, because they are the fundamental equations of how the climate system, and the atmosphere, and the ocean works.

Sometimes importation from the metropole becomes explicit. Rowena (gender, Australia) remembers, in the early development of Australian feminist scholarship, searching for ‘frameworks’ in the literature from the metropole, after adopting the US model of women’s studies. Maria (gender, Brazil) brings the connection up to date: I think that today I have my research group, right? And my new research group has things which return, which are more up to date. For example, we study Judith Butler. Every semester we choose something by Butler to read.

But it is best not to assume this means a passive dependency, especially in a domain still under construction. The agency of the researchers can most directly be seen at the level of personal practice. Even an anonymised summary of Peter’s career trajectory shows this point clearly: Peter, a very senior researcher in a highly technical field, gave a long and thoughtful interview, over three cups of coffee, as the sun sank, with a detailed narrative of his career and many reflections on his field. He grew up in a middle class professional family in the Southern 82

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds tier. He went as expected to the local university, was inspired by some of his teachers, did well, but was uncertain about his future. Happily he was recruited to a graduate programme in the global North, where he met and was mentored by ‘the leading [specialists] in the world of that era’. He rapidly built a career in an expanding field, gaining appointment at another elite global North centre: ‘Again an amazing set of people coming through there. And it was a real hub, a wonderful place to work’. Peter did extremely well, publishing in the very top journals and forming a strong network. But for family reasons he sought to return home, just at the time the new domain of knowledge was emerging. This involved an intellectual shift, applying his methodological expertise to a new set of problems. It also involved Peter in ‘trying to create a field’ in a material sense. Over the next two decades he won government funding, built a research agenda and team, recruited staff, and trained up graduate students to be the next generation of researchers. At the same time he kept publishing in global North journals, going to international conferences and keeping his membership in the ‘invisible college’ in his field, making easy informal connections with researchers who were ‘thinking in the same way in the US’. Through Peter’s efforts, then, techniques that had been developed in the global North became the paradigm for research in a new domain in the global South. This was a creative, energetic and sometimes stressful process, far from passive dependence. It produced feedback to the North, since Peter’s unit did pioneering work. The paradigm was also taken to poorer countries in the region, as Peter became an international research advisor, funded by development agencies.

The case of Thomas is another good example of this agency. Thomas worked part-time with the Brazilian AIDS Centre lead by Franz. Before joining this group, he took part in an interdisciplinary research project focused on sexuality and HIV prevention. During this earlier period, Thomas went to the global North several times. He told us that the Brazilian team adapted some interventions designed in the USA to curb risky sexual behaviour—he 83

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specifically mentioned that their goal was to create a ‘Brazilian intervention’ by employing techniques from the Oppressed Theatre and by doing ‘transcultural’ translations of North American techniques. (This theatre was a creation of playwright Augusto Boal in the early 1970s as a means to democratise theatre and ‘de-mechanise’ the body through exercises and games). The main adaption was to create eight meetings which lasted two hours each, in which mental health patients took an active role in the classes. Thomas explained that the Brazilian team was planning to export this project to Africa, because Oppressed Theatre is now a global phenomenon. In all these three cases (Peter, Gretta and Thomas), the creative dimension of extraversion appears as a pattern of personal practice. But extraversion is also a matter of institutional practice, which means that individuals must face structural challenges that are quite difficult to change. The current policy of many Southern tier universities and their research managers is to pressure researchers to publish in international ‘top journals’ so the instit­ utions will climb the league tables. Indeed, this pressure is a major concern for our interviewees, especially the impact it is having on young researchers. James (climate change, Australia) has an interesting variation on this. He advises his juniors which journals they should publish in to boost their visibility and raise their h-index. But as a very senior academic he can follow a different path himself: My publication strategy is to publish in journals that I think will reach the target audience that will be most interested in what I have to write.

Therefore James publishes work in low impact journals with a specifically regional audience. But for many respondents there is a sound practical reason for publishing in top Northern journals: their work gets read and cited more. Sally (HIV, South Africa) notes there is ‘brilliant’ work published in small South African journals, but ‘it all just gets buried’. ‘Why work hard and write if you don’t get the biggest audience possible?’ Publishing in global North journals has become practically a requirement for promotion and even for appointment (Connell 2017). Many of our interviewees—who, it will be recalled, were selected for inclusion in our study because they are leading researchers in their fields—have an impressive record with metropolitan journals. Nicole (HIV, Australia), for instance, can list Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine and The 84

Southern Tier Intellectual Workers and Their Worlds

Lancet in her bibliography. Most of her work goes into ‘middle ranking specialist journals’, which are also published in the metropole. The climate domain provides a striking example of institutional extra­ version. Bernardo, a leading climate scientist in Brazil, recalls how a framework was established there. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 on the initiative of global North scientists, created a threefold framework of international working parties and reports for collating research findings. The Brazilians collect­ ively applied this model, and Bernardo’s account is an excellent summary of processes that appear in all domains: Thus, like the IPCC, we put together three teams. There are three volumes for a report, three working groups. Like the IPCC, one on atmospheric science, a second on vulnerabilities and the impacts and adaptations to climate change, and the third on mitigating change, in other words how to reduce emissions… The idea is that with this we can also bring this discussion to Brazil, do a report in Portuguese on the question, calling attention to the particularities of Brazil and the implications for Brazil… of this research in the whole world, this field. And also generate material for us to contribute in a more robust and systematic manner, taking into account our particularities, for the IPCC reports.

Here, the framework provided by the international body is mirrored, but the content and the policy debates are local. This way of structuring the domain is used to address local agendas, and what Bernardo emphasises as ‘the particularities of Brazil’. At the same time, it allows the knowledge produced locally to be fed into the international assemblage of knowledge. At both individual and institutional levels, extraversion constructs a specific and valued role for knowledge workers in the South. We may call this the local expert, in which researchers or research groups are recognised as having extensive knowledge of the local situation while using concepts and methodologies from the North. They are in a position to generate data from the periphery for both local and metropolitan audiences, and some follow a two-track publishing strategy. Work in this style is often welcomed by metropolitan journals. Such work is also welcomed by multinational agencies, and the local expert becomes the ‘go to’ person for setting up multi-country studies or intervention programmes. Many of our respondents have enacted this role for some part of their careers. 85

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But the ‘road to the North’ can also lead to unexpected consequences, which is a perfect example of how extraversion is not a one-way track. Carolina (gender, Brazil), a young Afro-Brazilian scholar, explained that her period in the global North during her PhD was crucial for both acquiring academic skills and getting to know more black scholars: And I made various friendships. So, we were not in any research group, but we spent the whole day together. We talked, exchanged references, discussed our references about texts, made comparisons between Brazil, the United States, Canada, the Dominican Republic, and thinking about the situation of black women… Nathalie from Haiti, was also important. So, I think I invested more in this personal academic network than in formal research groups.

The interview with Carolina highlights a less discussed aspect of the exper­ iences of Southern workers. While the ‘North’ can be regarded as a signif­ icant hegemon, for researchers who experience racism and sexism ‘at home’, ‘going North’ can mean liberating oneself from a subaltern position and being able to develop better tools for their future work and working lives. It is clear then, that extraversion is a structural condition, but is also negotiated in the daily lives of knowledge producers in the global South. The global connections that drive the work of these researchers are still very much controlled by institutions and actors based in the North, but the flow of knowledge and resources can be negotiated, thus producing spaces for contestation and forms of ‘local knowledge’. The following chapters will expand on these possibilities.

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Publication Patterns in the New Domains This chapter examines global publication patterns, and, in so doing, offers an indicative map of the global knowledge system. The map shows who contributes to the system, how these contributions are uneven, geographically and politically, and how they have changed over time. We draw our evidence from a statistical analysis of the massive on-line databases of the Web of Science, which indexes academic, scholarly public­ations from around the world. Approaching this in two ways, we first use the search tools of the Web of Science to reveal a broad pattern of Northerndominated knowledge production; and then move to a fine-grained analysis of this pattern using the method of context-content analysis. Focusing on the three domains of knowledge described in previous chapters, our analysis demonstrates a pattern of definitive statistical predominance in all three domains by researchers and institutions from the global North, but also reveals interesting differences between the domains.

The Web of Science and Data Analysis The past three decades have witnessed an enormous growth in the production and exchange of intellectual knowledge products across the global knowledge system. In previous chapters we obtained a sense of this growth from the narratives of the knowledge workers themselves, but a more comprehensive, though less personal, view can be found through a statistical, systematic examination of the output of scholarly publications. For this purpose, we employ the data base of the Web of Science and its analytical tools. The Web of Science (hereafter WoS), is a commercial product of Clarivate Analytics (previously owned by Thomson Reuters) and sold via subscript­ ion to organisations such as university libraries. It indexes a large set of articles, drawn from a selection of journals across many disciplines and research fields. Initially it drew only on journals based in the United States, but the WoS is continually expanding, progressively including journals from peripheral countries, such as Australia, and has begun to index books and conference papers. Likewise, the WoS is now more inclusive of papers

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in various languages, though the dominant language is English. While in the hands of Thomson Reuters, a series of new databases was developed in conjunction with other organisations to expand its reach. For instance, in conjunction with the Chinese Academy of Science, the WoS now hosts a Chinese language index, The Chinese Science Citation Database. (More information about how we use the WoS for this study can be found in the extensive appendix at the rear of this book). There are at least two problems with the WoS view of knowledge production that are worth emphasising at this point. First, because the WoS database selects its content primarily from journals with known impact factors, from English-language papers, and from the journal collections of the major publishing houses; the resulting data offers us a Northern view of scholarly knowledge production. That is, it seriously under-represents the knowledge production of the countries of the global South. This must be taken into account when viewing the graphs and figures drawn from its data base and others of similar design. Second, the WoS, because of its emphasis on journal articles, also tends to underplay the knowledge production of disciplines that place greater or equal importance on books, policy reports, newspapers, and other products including creative works and performances. Hence it is lopsided, that is, very much a picture of knowledge production as defined by the physical, biomedical and technological science disciplines. Despite these problems, the WoS, a major indexing system across all disciplines and specialities, can provide a reasonable indication of the historically recent growth in publications. In 2014 for example, the WoS held 90 million records (primarily journal articles), but by 2017 it had over 100 million records from 33,000 different journals, plus conference proceedings, and increasingly, books. This is a significant increase in just a few years in the amount of material indexed in the WoS, and gives an indication also of the amount of material available to be indexed. Another indication of the significant growth in knowledge products is revealed by examining the expansion in each of our three emerging domains of knowledge: climate change, HIV/AIDS, and gender studies. Figure 1 provides a graph of the three domains since 1980. In each case there is a significant upward trend in the number of publications being produced. The WoS indicates that each of the three domains emerged only in the 1980s—which ties in with our historical findings reported in Chapter Two. With regards to the multi-disciplinary field of climate change, only 39 papers were indexed for 1980, but by 2015, the WoS indexed 22,633 publications. 88

Figure 1: Number of papers 1980–2015, three knowledge domains, Web of Science

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: climat* chang*, HIV/AIDS, HIV, AIDS, gender Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1980–2015

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In the domain of HIV/AIDS, no papers appear in the index until 1982, and then only three in that year. By 2015 there are 13,307. In the gender and sex domain, the growth is equally stunning: from 85 papers in 1980 to 26,491 in 2015.

Gender and Sex It is important to note that while we are most interested in gender studies as a knowledge domain, WoS analytical tools cannot readily disting­ uish between papers examining gender as a relational concept, and papers employing the term gender merely as a category. What do we mean by this? Gender as a categorical concept means using the word in a binary fashion, often merely as a variable, to indicate whether the subjects belong to a male or female group (as defined by the biological reproductive organs). Authors using gender in this way may not even have human behaviour as their focus, but instead examine non-human flora and fauna, or even concentrate their research at the cellular level. Indeed it has become common in the biolog­ ical sciences to use the word gender to refer to biological sex. In contrast, as a relational concept, gender indicates an arena of study where attention is paid to the identities, experiences, and behaviours associated with the designated social roles and societal expectations of men and women. Most importantly, it does not take the categories of male and female as given, but assumes gender to be socially constructed, albeit in association with biological existence. The term gender has come to be understood in this way within the social sciences, at least since the 1970s. It is also the way it is used within the documents of the World Health Organization. Chapter Two in this volume provides a history of the emergence of gender studies as a domain of knowledge. However, because the analytic tools within the WoS don’t easily distinguish between papers using gender as a relat­ ional and a categorical concept, the statistical growth of the gender studies domain as indicated by the WoS is less accurate than it is for the climate change and HIV/AIDS domains, for its publications are subsumed within what is a much larger domain: a domain of sex and gender research. This said, it is possible to obtain a rough indication of how many of the papers identified by the WoS as belonging to the large gender and sex domain might indeed be about the relations of gender, rather than about gender as a category. This can be achieved by looking at the way papers are assigned to one or more ‘fields of research’ in the WoS. These fields are, in many cases, discipline-based, for instance sociology, psychology, 90

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plant sciences, physiology, psychiatry etc. The WoS also categorises papers from these fields into larger categories, such as the life sciences, the phys­ ical sciences, the medical sciences, the arts and social sciences. Given that the social sciences and humanities are more likely than the life, medical or physical sciences to use a relational understanding of gender, the ‘field of research’ function provides a rough means to distinguish between the papers and a somewhat more accurate map of the growth of the domain of gender studies. Table 1 provides information about the designation of papers according to their disciplinary fields. Table 1: Disciplinary composition of gender and sex domain over time

Technology and Life and Physi10cal Sciences and BioMedicine

Social Sciences

Arts and Humanities

Total Hits

1985

115 (25%)

318 (68%)

32 (7%)

465 (100%)

1995

3818 (53%)

3184 (44%)

253 (4%)

7255 (100%)

2005

12887 (66%)

6129 (31%)

593 (3%)

19609 (100%)

2015

28864 (63%)

15467 (34%)

1704 (4%)

46035 (100%)

Gender and Sex

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: gender Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. Research Areas. Top 500 results only (maximum available in WoS). Minimum record count = 1. Coded into three areas: (1) humanities and arts (2) social sciences (3) life sciences, physical sciences, biomedicine, science and technology. As per WoS schema at: http://images. webofknowledge.com/WOKRS58B4/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.html Note: Numerical values in columns 2 to 4 denote number of research areas designated by WoS for the papers, and because the research areas are not mutually exclusive, a paper may belong to several research areas. Thus total number of research areas is greater than the number of papers for each year.

From Table 1 we can see that the term gender has become increasingly common within the life, medical and physical sciences, but in 1985 was largely restricted to papers within the social sciences. The Table also indicates that gender studies tends to be a smaller field of study within the larger sex and gender domain. Using these figures, we can re-draw Figure 1 to indicate this significant difference in size between the domains of 91

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‘gender’ and ‘gender and sex’. This data is offered in Figure 2, revealing a somewhat more accurate map of the domains and their relative sizes. The domain of gender, where gender is treated as a relational phenomenon, is no longer the largest of the domains, though its pattern of growth seems to be very similar to that of the larger domain of ‘gender and sex’. Figure 2: Growth of domains 1985-2015, differentiating between the domains of ‘Gender and Sex’ and ‘Gender’

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: climat* chang*, HIV/AIDS, HIV, AIDS, gender Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. Research Areas. Top 500 results only (maximum available in WoS). Minimum record count = 1. Coded into three areas: (1) humanities and arts (2) social sciences (3) life sciences, physical sciences, biomedicine, science and technology. As per WoS schema at: http://images. webofknowledge.com/WOKRS58B4/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.htm Note: The domains of climate change, HIV/AIDS and sex and gender represent the number of papers published in each of the four years, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. The domain of gender represents the number of papers classified as belonging to the arts, humanities and social sciences for those years.

The Formation of the Domains From Figures 1 and 2, we can gain an indication of the growth of the three domains since 1980 and their rather different histories. In all three cases, the formation of the domains and their trajectories can be associated with particular societal events, such as the growing public debates about gender, climate change and HIV/AIDS. Such events may have precipitated an interest in these subjects in the intellectual and scholarly communities, or the scholarly interest and resulting publications may have themselves raised public interest. (Most likely there has been a dynamic interaction between the two). The historical timing and formation of the domains in Australia, Brazil and South Africa has been detailed in Chapter Two. In this section 92

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we take an international rather than national focus on the association between the domains and world events. Precise dates for the emergence of the domains is difficult, even with the WoS indexes, given that there has always been a lag between societal events and scholarly publications (though increasingly less so with the new forms of electronic publishing). Nevertheless, taking the gender domain first, we can identify a rising concern with women’s (in)equality (associated with second wave feminism) within several nation states for some decades prior to the formation of the domain, particularly in Britain, Australia and the US over the right to vote and sit in parliament. From the 1970s however, as a consequence of research, community activism and intensive lobby­ ing, women’s equality became an international matter, and events such as the United Nations World Conferences on Women not only reflect these rising concerns, but are likely to have themselves been influential in building interest about gender inequality and thus assisting in the formation of a domain of gender. The first of these international conferences took place in 1975 in Mexico city, coinciding with International Women’s Year. The second conference was in 1980 in Copenhagen, marking the mid-point of the United Nations Decade for Women; the third in 1985 in Nairobi, and the fourth in 1995 in Beijing. The domain of climate change also has a ‘pre-history’. Interest in environmental pollution, in the contaminants of industrialisation and the dangers to human health from crowded, unsewered, unregulated and unplanned cities, can be found in many cities throughout the nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, there was even a small but growing scientific interest in the climate and its changes. However, by the 1960s, both scientific and public interest had gathered specifically around the potential connections between human activity and climatic variation, and a broad range of publications began to appear, from popular works dealing with environmental pollution (for instance, Rachel Carson’s work Silent Spring in 1962, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb in 1968), as well as scientific and government reports monitoring climate change and warning of the dangers of carbon dioxide build-up (for example, US President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee’s report ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment’, which was published in 1965, and John Sawyer’s study Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the ‘Greenhouse’ Effect in 1972). Yet it is only after the 1979 World Climate Conference of the World Meteorological Association that publications from the academic and scholarly commun­ ity appear in the WoS collections. Thus we take 1980 as indicative of the 93

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beginning of the domain of climate science, and, as can be seen in Figure 1, bursts of publications appear to have been stimulated from that point onward by the establishment of the World Meteorological Association’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, and the subsequent IPCC Assessment Reports published in 1990 (First Assessment Report), 1995 (Second Assessment Report), 2001 (Third Assessment Report), 2007 (Fourth Assessment Report), and 2013/2014 (Fifth Assessment Report). The third domain, HIV/AIDS, was formed only after the public naming of a disease by the American Centers for Disease Control in August 1982. Between 1981 and 1982, when a cluster of otherwise healthy homosexual men were reported to be suffering from Pneumocystis pneumonia and other opportunistic diseases across the United States, it became apparent that a new disease had emerged. Initially called GRID or gay-related immune deficiency, it was quickly re-named acquired immune deficiency syndrome or AIDS once it became apparent to scientists and officials that the problem was not confined to homosexual men but present also among haemophiliacs and users of intravenous drugs. The conversion of these ‘medical’ pronouncements into a domain of intellectual and scholarly knowledge occurred over a rather brief period, albeit one that attracted significant media attention worldwide (often sensationalist and focusing on the homosexual community). There was significant public panic, leading to actions that, with the benefits of hindsight, can be considered insensitive, and by many, homophobic. Some of these actions included the closure of gay bathhouses, the banning of gay persons from donating blood, banning HIV positive people from taking air flights or attending school, firing employees who were HIV positive, and other actions that indicate the level of fear of the new disease. The intellectual knowledge domain thus formed in this context of fear and discriminatory behaviour. Several events and developments were of particular importance to the establishment of the domain, including the identification of the virus in 1983 (by two independent medical science teams, one at the Pasteur Institute in France, and the other at the University of California in San Francisco); the formation of numerous communitybased, state and national bodies to support sufferers, challenge misconcept­ ions about the disease and lobby for public assistance (such as AIDS Action and the National Association of People with AIDS in the US; and the AIDS Action Committee in NSW Australia, which later becomes the AIDS Council of NSW or ACON); many national events (including AIDS Candlelight Marches and Vigils); the establishment of foundations, 94

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charities and trusts (such as the Terrence Higgins Trust in the UK and the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation in Australia); and the financial support of many private organisations and governments for epidemiological, medical and public health research, community support and public health activities. In contrast to the two other domains, the HIV/AIDS domain was almost immediately an international field, with the World Health Organization holding its first meeting concerning AIDS in December 1983. By this time, cases of AIDS had been reported in thirty-three countries, and in April 1985, the 1st International AIDS Conference was held in Atlanta, hosted by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the World Health Organization. This was quickly followed by the 2nd International AIDS Conference in 1986 in Paris. Another unique feature of the HIV/AIDS domain is how dramatically its contours shifted over time. In the 1980s it was an entirely Northern field, focused on the gay population, and dominated by the biomedical sciences. Yet from the 1990s as the extent of the pandemic came to be realised, the domain was shown to have a significant ‘Southern’ dimension (particularly in Africa), and was reconfigured from a medical problem to a major societal challenge.

Disciplines and the Composition of the Domains The three domains of knowledge have somewhat different disciplinary compositions and trajectories. Although all three are dominated by the physical, life and biomedical sciences, the extent to which this occurs varies between the domains. Taking first of all the domain of climate change, Figure 3 demonstrates that the significant majority of the papers in this domain are classified as deriving from the physical, life and biomedical sciences. Indeed the social sciences, arts and humanities have only been a very small com­ ponent of the domain, and show some growth only from 2005. We know from our interviews with scholars in the climate change domain that the field is quite fragmented, built from many disciplines and groups. Some scholars focus very narrowly on a specific area from within a specific discipline, such as hydrology or mathematical modelling, others on the human impact of climate change or the need to reduce harm to the planet. Alison, a climate scientist in Australia, says these groups rarely communicate with one another. They have ‘different ways of looking at things, different ways of thinking about things, and… not only do they think differently but they have a different emphasis on what is important’. 95

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The many disciplines and sub-disciplines in the field add to this picture of fragmentation. These disciplines are as diverse as physics and engineering (mechanics, waves, basic thermodynamics), maths (multivariate cal­ culus, linear algebra, basic statistics, differential equations), chemistry, the environmental sciences (meteorology, oceanography, physical geography, geology, paleoclimatology, glaceology, or hydrology), computing (data mining, statistical analysis, data visualisation, low level languages), and the life sciences (including microbiology, zoology, botany, ecology or bio­ logy). These are the disciplines that are primarily represented in the IPCC reports, although given the amount of time involved in contributing to the reports, in some countries the lead authors are often from government laboratories rather than from academic institutions (Wanda, climate change, USA). Nevertheless, the IPCC reports have become a defining feature of the domain. As Marcus tells us, if you seek promotion or appointment, you need to be in the IPCC report, or at least you must be cited in it: ‘if you are a major player in terms of research and you publish in the peer-review literature you will be in the IPCC…’ [Marcus, climate change, Australia]. Some disciplines have none or very little presence in this field. For instance, public health has barely managed to find a legitimate space within this very crowded domain. The first IPCC report did not have a ‘chapter on health and [made] virtually no mention of it, but the second report did’ [Damien, climate change, Australia]. Even after the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment was initiated in 2001—a United Nations project designed to assess the consequences of ecosystem changes for human well-being—the conferences associated with this were dominated by the physical/natural sciences. Damien went ‘to about twenty meetings with them… that was mostly scientists, very few social scientists… you did always feel on the margin’. One of the consequences of the domain being over-represented by the physical/natural sciences, and biomedicine rather than public health, is that the knowledge produced within the domain reflects the interests and agendas of the dominant disciplines and groups. This means it may not be the most valuable form of knowledge from the perspective of policy­ makers, those seeking justice or social reform, or even environmental activists. Damien for instance, is interested in the connections between climate change and health. He says the ‘big issues’ with climate change are food security; the potential for conflict on a regional, national or world scale; forced migration; and massive under-nutrition. He says we should be focusing on these, not the threat of new diseases or: 96

Publication Patterns in the New Domains …really obscure viruses which… are perceived as threats to rich populations and so there is a lot of funding bias and investigator bias, it is a scientific novelty, but at the end of the day it is not very important. But that view wasn’t very much appreciated… they get a lot of money for studying obscure diseases… or like Bird Flu which is a big threat to birds and I think it is actually trivial for humans [Damien, climate change, Australia].

However, according to Damien, it is difficult to obtain funding for the ‘big issues’, and proves his claim by showing what the ARC and NHMRC have, and have not funded over the past six years. One of the reasons perhaps, says Damien, for the neglect of some issues, is that there are no major institutions in the world leading the way for climate change and health: ‘it is bitsy you know, there are individuals here with small groups around them but there is no really big centre…’ [Damien, climate change, Australia]. This stands in contrast to other areas within the domain of climate change, where there are major institutions in the world that are leading the field (such the Hadley Centre, which is part of the Meteorology Office in the UK; the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, USA; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), also in the USA; the Centre for Atmospheric Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR), which is a Weather Bureau/CSIRO joint organisation in Australia; the Rachel Carson Centre at the University of Munich; Columbia University in New York; the Chinese Academy of Science; the Russian Academy of Science; and the Deutscher Wetterdienst, which is the German Weather Service). The social sciences entered the domain much later than the physical sciences, becoming a more active participant from about 2005. Like the physical sciences, there are multiple disciplines and sub-disciplines within the social sciences, with many offering diverse and challenging perspect­ ives. They include law, economics, ethics, political science, science and technology studies, the communication of science, social geography and sociology. The entry of the social sciences also appears to have been accompanied by (though not necessarily caused by), greater interaction between all the disciplines across the domain: [There] is a much richer interdisciplinary interaction than it was say two decades ago… I think it is just a recognition on all sides that this is a pretty complex issue, so some integrative research is required when the actual physics of the climate system interact with human societies [Marcus, climate change, Australia]. 97

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

The domain is not only very extensive, according to the huge quantity of publications indexed by WoS, and much larger than either gender studies or HIV/AIDS (as evident in Figure 2), but its subject matter is more contentious, and its contours and boundaries are less exact. We used the term climate change when discussing the domain with participants, but most would not describe their field in this way. As Wanda stated, given the div­ isive politics of climate change, particularly in America, she rarely discusses her field in public: If I am in a conversation with someone in an aeroplane and they ask what I do I generally will not tell them quite what I do… I am tired of having that conversation… it is exhausting to hear the same fallacies repeated over and over again and to have to try to counter them. I give a lot of public talks about climate change and I really try but at a certain point I think I am just going to get too tired of showing earth’s temperature history again… It feels like the dialogue should be a lot further along and we should be talking about other things… to debate whether the climate is warming is just, I am past that… [Wanda, climate change, USA].

Unlike our participants in the HIV/AIDS or gender domains, few of those in the climate change domain would characterise their work using this name. Some called themselves climate scientists, but most described themselves as belonging to a discipline or sub-discipline. Moreover, while all three domains are composed of scholars as well as scholar-activists and scholar-policymakers; it is probably accurate to suggest that the form­ ation of the climate change domain brought a degree of change to many of the established disciplines of the physical sciences. Indeed, the domain created a new, energising focus for interdisciplinary work, producing conversations among scholars which had hitherto not taken place. This is evidenced by the number of participants in our study who spoke of how climate change has changed the way scientists view themselves and their roles: …through the experiences of about 20 years of working in this domain it’s been a big realisation that science people working in this area have to be proactive in fighting the case, because the anticlimate change lobby is so vocal and so organised that you can’t just play the traditional scientist role of doing science and allowing it to trickle through and somehow inform knowledge, because everything 98

Publication Patterns in the New Domains that happens in this domain is really distorted by very well-funded sceptical sceptics—and so one has to be quite, well, it’s not quite an activist scientist but you have to be a strong advocate for your work and play a role in countering some of the rubbish that comes out of the sceptical world. So it’s becoming more proactive and activist [Harold, climate change, South Africa]. Figure 3: The domain of climate change, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: climat* chang* Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. Research Areas. Top 500 results only (maximum available in WoS). Minimum record count = 1. The domain of climate change represents the number of papers published in each of the four years, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and coded into three areas: (1) humanities and arts (2) social sciences (3) life sciences, physical sciences, biomedicine, science and technology. As per WoS schema at: http:// images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS58B4/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.html

The composition of the HIV/AIDS domain shows an even greater domination by the sciences, in this case, the biomedical sciences, though the social sciences, arts and humanities begin to enter the field earlier than they do in the domain of climate change. This can be seen clearly in Figure 4. Thus, as the domain of knowledge about HIV/AIDS progresses, it increasingly includes knowledge from the social sciences, and this form of knowledge in many cases challenges the understandings of the disease as narrated by the biomedical sciences. The extent to which this is the case varies with time, and across societies. In Australia, the social sciences were involved at an early period in supporting community action for AIDS 99

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Figure 4: The domain of HIV/AIDS, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: HIV/AIDS, HIV, AIDS Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. Research Areas. Top 500 results only (maximum available in WoS). Minimum record count = 1. The domain of HIV/AIDS represents the number of papers published in each of the four years, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and coded into three areas: (1) humanities and arts (2) social sciences (3) life sciences, physical sciences, biomedicine, science and technology. As per WoS schema at: http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS58B4/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.html

Figure 5: The domain of gender, disciplinary composition, 1985–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: gender . Search parameters: articles and reviews only, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015. Research Areas. Top 500 results only (maximum available in WoS). Minimum record count = 1. The domain of gender and sex represents the number of papers published in each of the four years, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and coded into three areas: (1) humanities and arts (2) social sciences (3) life sciences, physical sciences, biomedicine, science and technology. As per WoS schema at: http://images.webofknowledge.com/WOKRS58B4/help/WOS/hp_research_areas_easca.html

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prevention; for instance the ‘Social Aspects of Prevention of AIDS’ project, based at Macquarie University in Australia and launched in 1986, was developed in very close cooperation with the gay community in Sydney, and with government support. At that time, community action (for example, promoting the use of condoms), was the only effective way of controlling the epidemic – and it is still important. But as anti-retroviral drugs were developed, biomedical science regained its centrality. In contrast, in South Africa, the viral explanation of AIDS was contested for some years, notably by the government itself, as discussed in Chapter Two. The domain which indicates the least domination by the physical, life and biomedical sciences is that of gender. Figure 5 shows its composition, and though the field is clearly dominated by the physical, life and biomed­ical sciences, the domain of gender is different from the other two domains in that there was a strong presence from the social sciences from the beginning of its formation.

National Contributions to the Domains Another feature of the WoS is that it can reveal the unevenness of the various national contributions to each of the domains. The ‘country’ search function in the WoS provides data about the national origin of its public­ ations, based on the stated country affiliation of the authors. Again, it is an approximate indicator only—publications are included in the country group if at least one of the authors is from that country, and hence a paper may appear more than once in the totals for each country. (If a paper has five authors, each one of them from the USA, the category of USA will be boosted by five, not one). Table 2 offers a view of the countries with the highest output of publications in each domain (showing only the top 25 countries by output) for two years: 1990 and 2015. Looking at the 2015 columns first of all, publications from the United States dominate the field in all three domains, with England and Germany in the top four for climate change and sex and gender. A surprising result of this analysis is the high output of China, which took its place in the top four by 2015 for all three domains. Australia, Brazil and South Africa can all be found in the top 25 for all three domains. Note that South Africa is in third position with regards HIV/AIDS publications, but 22nd in climate change and 23rd in sex and gender. In 1990, the USA was also the most prominent country in terms of output for all three domains. Other positions close to the top were taken 101

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by England, Canada, France and Germany. China was in 13th position for climate change in 1990, and 24th position for sex and gender, but didn’t make it into the top 25 for the HIV/AIDS domain. South Africa took 4th place in 1990 for climate change, but dropped to 22nd in 2015; was not in the top 25 in 1990 for HIV/AIDS, but rose dramatically to 3rd place in 2015; and moved from 19th place in 1990 for sex and gender down to 23rd place in 2015. Brazil was in 25th place in 1990 for climate change, rising to take the 16th place in 2015; was not in the top 25 for HIV/AIDS in 1990 but appeared in 13th position in 2015; and moved from 13th place in 1990 with sex and gender to 11th place in 2015. Australia was in 7th position in 1990 in the climate change domain, and moved up slightly to 5th position in 2015; shifted from 15th place in HIV/AIDS in 1990 to 7th position by 2015; and moved downwards slightly from 4th position in 1990 in the sex and gender domain to 5th position in 2015. Figures 6, 7 and 8 present the growth in the three domains of knowledge for a selected group of countries. There are many countries missing from these Figures because their inclusion would make the graphs too difficult to read. We have focused here on publications from the Southern countries of Brazil, South Africa and Australia, but added in the USA, England and China for comparison. Turning our attention first of all to Figure 6, which displays the growth of the climate change domain since 1980 for a small selection of countries, the highest output comes from the USA, with 7,447 papers for the year 2015, compared with 3,324 from China, 2,533 from England, 2,160 from Australia, 575 from Brazil, and 387 from South Africa. Note that the contributions from South Africa and Brazil display very little growth over time, while the other countries, particularly China (for the past decade), reveal a more energetic engagement with the domain. Figure 7 provides similar data for the domain of HIV/AIDS, and Figure 8 for the domain of sex and gender. Again the USA dominates both domains, but note the drop in the number of publications from the USA since 2014 with regards HIV/AIDS. The extent to which the domain of HIV/AIDS is dominated by the USA is evident here, for the decrease in funding of HIV/AIDS research in the USA has affected the global domain as a whole. This becomes more evident if we compare Figure 7 with either Figure 6 or 8, for the other countries do not show the same recent lowering of interest.

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Table 2: WoS publication output, 1990 and 2015, ranked by country

Climate Change 1990 2015 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

USA England Canada South Africa Germany France Australia USSR Sweden Belgium New Zealand Netherlands China Czech Repub Israel Scotland Spain Hungary India Kenya Norway Switzerland Venezuela Argentina Brazil

USA China England Germany Australia Canada France Spain Italy Netherlands Sweden Switzerland Japan India Norway Brazil Denmark Finland Scotland Belgium South Korea South Africa Austria Russia Portugal

HIV/AIDS 1990 USA France Germany England Italy Canada Japan Switzerland Belgium Netherlands Sweden USSR Scotland Spain Australia Denmark Austria Kenya Greece Tanzania Yugoslavia Cote Ivoire Czech Repub India Zambia

2015 USA England South Africa China Canada France Australia Spain Germany Italy India Netherlands Brazil Switzerland Uganda Belgium Japan Kenya Thailand Sweden Tanzania Denmark South Korea Malawi Nigeria

Sex and Gender 1990 2015 USA Canada England Australia Israel Germany Netherlands Scotland Austria Japan Sweden Norway Brazil France Italy Mexico New Zealand N. Ireland South Africa Switzerland Belgium India Ireland China Chile

USA England China Germany Australia Canada Spain Netherlands Italy Turkey Brazil Sweden France South Korea Japan Taiwan Switzerland Denmark Belgium Norway India Israel South Africa Finland Poland

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search Terms: climat* chang*, HIV/AIDS and gender. Search parameters: articles and reviews only; 1990 and 2015; country classification indicates at least one author of the paper is from the USA, or China, or England, or Australia, or South Africa or Brazil. Top 25 countries only.

Figure 6: Number of climate change papers, selected countries, 1980–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search Terms: climat* chang*    Search parameters: articles and reviews only; 1980–2015 only; country classification indicates at least one author of the paper is from the USA, or China, or England, or Australia, or South Africa or Brazil. Selected countries only, using WoS country classification.

Figure 7: Number of HIV/AIDS papers, selected countries, 1980–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: HIV/AIDS, HIV, AIDS. Search parameters: articles and reviews only; 1980–2015; country classification indicates at least one author of the paper is from the USA, or China, or England, or Australia, or South Africa or Brazil. Selected countries only, using WoS country classification.

Figure 8: Number of sex and gender papers, selected countries, 1980–2015

Source: Web of Science, Core Collection. Search terms: gender.    Search parameters: articles and reviews only; 1980–2015; country classification indicates at least one author of the paper is from the USA, or China, or England, or Australia, or South Africa or Brazil. Selected countries only, using WoS country classification.

Publication Patterns in the New Domains

Journals and the Hierarchy of the Sciences The WoS can show us not only the relative output of various nations, but reveal which journals are predominant in each domain. Although publishers and publishing are the focus of our next chapter, it is worth pointing out here that an examination of journal publishing reveals our domains to be statistically dominated by journals which first of all, concentrate on the physical, life or medical sciences rather than the arts, humanities or social sciences, and secondly, are owned by organisations which have their headquarters in the global North. Table 3 shows the ten most popular journals (according to publication rates) for the three domains over the period 2013 to 2015 (a period in which the ranking did not change), and the country of ownership and headquarters. While there is some variation, the top journals in each domain tend to publish papers from the physical, life and/or medical sciences, rather than the arts, humanities or social sciences. For instance, the website of PLOS ONE, which is the highest ranked journal (according to output) in all three domains, states: PLOS ONE features reports of original research from all disciplines within science and medicine [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/journal-information].

Likewise, the Journal of Climate website announces: The Journal of Climate ( JCLI) publishes research that advances basic understanding of the dynamics and physics of the climate system on large spatial scales, including variability of the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and cryosphere; past, present, and projected future changes in the climate system; and climate simulation and prediction [https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/journals/journal-of-climate/].

It has already been noted above that the third domain, gender, has a rel­ atively greater social science presence than the other two. While the journal PLOS ONE attracts the highest number of research papers in this domain, the second ranking journal is Sex Roles. This journal is more accepting of the social sciences:

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Table 3: Top ten journals 2013–2015, by quantity of publications in three domains

HIV/AIDS

Climate Change

Journal title

Record Count

Publisher

Country

Plos One

608

Public Library Science, San Francisco

US

Journal of Climate

293

American Meteorological Society

US

Global Change Biology

286

Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

UK

Geophysical Research Letters

244

American Geophysical Union

US

Scientific Reports

226

Nature Publishing Group

UK

Climatic Change

220

Springer Netherlands

Neth

Climate Dynamics

213

Springer

Ger

Quaternary International

211

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd.

UK

Environmental Research Letters

208

IOP Publishing Ltd.

UK

Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres

196

Wiley-Blackwell Publishing; American Geophysical Union

US

Plos One

928

Public Library Science, San Francisco

US

Jaids Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes

341

Lippincott, William & Wilkins

US

AIDS

270

Lippincott, William & Wilkins

US

AIDS and Behavior

248

Springer / Plenum Publishers

US

AIDS Care Psychological and Socio Medical Aspects of AIDS HIV

221

Routledge

UK

Journal of Virology

210

American Society of Microbiology

US

AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses

168

Mary Ann Libert

US

BMC Public Health

154

Biomed Central London

UK

Clinical Infectious Diseases

147

Oxford University Press

US

BMC Infectious Diseases

146

Biomed Central London

UK

Journal title

Publisher

Country

3558

Public Library Science, San Francisco

Sex Roles

2510

Springer

US

Social Science Medicine

1477

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd.

UK

BMC Public Health

1325

Biomed Central London

UK

American Journal of Cardiology

1314

Excerpta Medica Inc—Elsevier Science Inc.

US

Pediatrics

1273

American acad. Pediatrics

US

Personality and Individual Differences

947

Pergamon-Elsevier Science Ltd.

UK

Journal of Clinical Endocrinology Metabolism

847

Endorcine Society

US

Journal of Affective Disorders

835

Elsevier Science BV

Neth

Journal of Adolescent Health

823

Elsevier Science inc.

US

PLOS One

Sex and Gender

Record Count

Source: Web of Science.

US

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER Sex Roles: A Journal of Research is a global, multi-disciplinary, scholarly, social and behavioral science journal with a feminist perspective. It publishes original research reports as well as original theoretical papers and conceptual review articles that explore how gender organ­ ises people’s lives and their surrounding worlds, including gender identities, belief systems, representations, interactions, relations, organ­ isations, institutions, and statuses [http://www.springer.com/psychology/journal/11199].

Nevertheless, our study indicates that most of the top ranked journals in the WoS domain of sex and gender are predominantly oriented toward the physical, life and/or medical sciences, with a particular emphasis on health and medicine where the term ‘gender’ is used in the categorical, rather than relational sense. From Table 3 it is quite evident that the journals carrying the largest number of publications in the sex and gender domain offer very little in the way of feminist theory or analysis. Most (PLOS ONE, BMC Public Health, American Journal of Cardiology etc.) are essentially bio­medical or generalist journals, while the journal Sex Roles, contains a very ‘pale’ form of feminism at best. What this analysis of the highly popular journals tells us, is that the knowledge content of the domains—or at least the parts of the domains that have become international—is systematically biased toward particular ‘thought styles’ (as Ludwik Fleck called them), or ‘paradigms’ (as Thomas Kuhn re-named them). In other words, the domains themselves are heavily biased toward the theoretical and methodological forms of knowledge favoured by the physical, life and biomedical sciences. Moreover, it is evident from Table 3 that across all three domains these highly popular journals are primarily headquartered in the global North, that is, the US, the UK, Germany or The Netherlands. Thus while the domains purport to be international in content, they primarily offer knowledge that has been recognised and legitimated by the scholars and institutions of the global North.

Further Analysis of the Three Domains: Study B2 There are a number of limitations in the analytical tools provided by the WoS, particularly with regards the gender of the authors and the funding sources of the research. Indeed there is no variable for gender among the search tools in the WoS, and with regards research funding, the WoS simply reports on funding sources as documented by the authors. When this category is investigated, the data cannot easily be used without extensive 110

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further manipulation and ‘cleaning’, because it includes all responses as if they are separate entities. For example, variations in the naming of funding sources such as the National Science Foundation, the NSF, the American Science Foundation, the Foundation of Science in the US, etc., are not aggregated but reported individually, thus making the counts highly inaccurate. So that we might provide additional information about the three domains, we conducted an in-depth study of a selection of papers drawn from the WoS using the method of context-content analysis (Collyer 2013). This modification of traditional content analysis aims to combine inform­ ation from electronic indexes with additional data taken from the manuscripts of journal articles or books, to ensure information about the author and their social circumstances (the context) are taken into account. Unlike many other studies using bibliographic or citation analysis, context-content analysis offers a sociology of knowledge approach to mapping knowledge domains. In this part of the study, we drew a population of papers from the WoS using the same basic parameters and search terms, as we had for the study reported above, though we focused on the recent years of 2011 to 2016. We then searched for additional information contained in the papers themselves and inserted this information into a database using the SPSS software package. This process, which we named Study B2 (described in greater detail in the methods appendix), enabled us to identify aspects of the domain not readily ascertainable using the WoS analytical tools alone. This part of our study is based on a random selection of 1,857 papers. The database contains approximately equal numbers of papers across the three domains and across four countries—the USA, Australia, Brazil and South Africa. The study population entails 28.4 per cent (528/1857) from the USA; 24.9 per cent (463/1857) from Australia; 22.0 per cent (408/1857) from Brazil; and 24.7 per cent (458/1857) from South Africa.

Gender and the Three Domains

Examining these 1,857 papers, we found it to contain an approximately equal number of women as the first author in our study sample (49.6 per cent or 920/1856 men, 50.4 per cent or 936/1856 women). However the proportion of women as first authors varies across countries. The highest number of women as first authors is found in Brazil (59.1 per cent or 241/408) and the lowest in the USA (46.1 per cent or 243/527). Moreover, when examining the composition of each domain, these are found to have varying proportions of men and women. As might be expected, the gender 111

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

studies domain has the highest proportion of women (as first author) at 61.4 per cent (383/624); HIV/AIDS has 55.7 per cent women (352/632); and women are least represented in the domain of climate change, 33.5 per cent (201/600). These varying proportions reflect the discipline groups discussed above, as women tend to have a lesser presence in the physical sciences (a dominant discipline in the climate change domain), and where women are present, are less likely to be in senior positions and hence less likely to be first authors of the papers. Our analysis also shows that the gender composition of the domains varies between countries. Women are least represented in the climate change domain in Australia (30.9 per cent or 50/162), and best represented in South Africa (36.4 per cent or 55/151). In HIV/AIDS, women are least represented in South Africa (48.7 per cent or 75/154), and most present in Brazil (69.7 per cent or 101/145). In the gender domain, women are least represented in the USA (54.1 per cent or 93/172) and best represented in Brazil (67.1 per cent or 100/149).

Research Funding and the Three Domains

Knowledge production invariably requires funding and so is impacted by the availability of resources. Resources are clearly more abundant in the North, and in many countries of the South there is little or only limited state support for research. This forces researchers to apply to Northern funding agencies. When they do so they are in competition with large teams of researchers, often better-resourced and with better access to funders. For this reason, access to funding (or the lack of it) contributes to explaining national knowledge inequalities. The funding of scholarly research is an increasingly significant issue for all fields of knowledge and for the knowledge workers themselves. This is despite the fact that when published, not all journal manuscripts contain information about the funding of the research. Some authors state their research did not require funding, but many do not mention the source of funds, although statements of this kind are increasingly present in the more recent issues of the journals. Manually examining the papers in our study population, we extracted information from each one about the author’s funding sources and sorted this into three categories. This information gives a sense of how knowledge workers in different countries and domains access funding for their research. We used three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/state foundations, universities and 112

Publication Patterns in the New Domains

Table 4: Funding sources by country, 2011–2016

Government

NonGovernment

Mixed

Total

USA

289 (67%)

71 (16%)

72 (17%)

432 (100%)

Australia

218 (75%)

25 (9%)

47 (16%)

290 (100%)

Brazil

189 (88%)

7 (3%)

19 (9%)

215 (100%)

South Africa

161 (61%)

26 (10%)

76 (29%)

263 (100%)

Source: WoS Core Collection. Years 2011–2016. Analysis: the statistical package for the social sciences. Study B2. Country affiliation based on the first author listed on the manuscript. Funding source based on manuscript information, sorted into three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/ state foundations, universities and institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities, associations, societies and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government).

institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government). In Table 4, information about funding sources is given for four countries in our study: the United States, Australia, Brazil and South Africa. The most notable element of the table is the predominance of public support for research in all four countries, varying from 61 per cent to 88 per cent. In this study population, the United States has the highest proportion of nongovernment, private sector funding relative to the other countries (71/432 of the papers or 16 per cent), and Brazil has the lowest at 7/215 papers or 3 per cent. This supports the general view of the United States as having a relatively healthy philanthropic and corporate sector interest in know­ ledge building. South Africa has a very high relative level of mixed funding, which illustrates the limited extent of local funding as well as a national research strategy of actively seeking research partners to improve its global research position. The information about funding can also be graphically represented. Figure 9 shows the relative proportions of government, nongovernment and mixed funding sources for the four countries. The graph indicates clearly the much larger mixed funding sector in South Africa, and the large government sectors of Brazil and Australia. The public/private mix of funding for research varies not only by country, but by knowledge domain. Figures 10, 11 and 12 show this for the three domains separately. Government funding is the major source for all three domains, and is particularly important in Brazil and Australia. The climate 113

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

Figure 9: Research funding by country, 2011– 2016

Source: WoS Core Collection. Years 2011–2016. Analysis: the statistical package for the social sciences. Study B2. Country affiliation based on manuscript information. Funding source based on manuscript information, sorted into three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/ state foundations, universities and institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities, associations, societies and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government).

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Figure 10: Sources of funding climate change, 2011–2016

Source: WoS Core Collection. Years 2011–2016. climate change domain. Analysis: the statistical package for the social sciences. Study B2. Country affiliation based on manuscript information. Funding source based on manuscript information, sorted into three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/ state foundations, universities and institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities, associations, societies and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government).

Figure 11: Sources of funding HIV/AIDS, 2011–2016

Source: WoS Core Collection. Years 2011–2016. HIV/AIDS domain. Analysis: the statistical package for the social sciences. Study B2. Country affiliation based on manuscript information. Funding source based on manuscript information, sorted into three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/ state foundations, universities and institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities, associations, societies and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government).

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Figure 12: Sources of funding gender, 2011–2016

Source: WoS Core Collection. Years 2011–2016. gender domain. Analysis: the statistical package for the social sciences. Study B2. Country affiliation based on manuscript information. Funding source based on manuscript information, sorted into three categories: government (national or foreign, including inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization, and public/ state foundations, universities and institutes), non-government (private sector companies and organisations, private foundations, universities, associations, societies and trusts), and mixed (government and non-government).

change domain (Figure 10) has proportionally less non-government funding than the domains of HIV/AIDS or gender, suggesting the private sector is somewhat tardy in its support for this domain of knowledge. Clearly the climate change domain is highly dependent, in all four countries, on public funding. With regards the HIV/AIDS domain (Figure 11), there is proportionally more non-government funding in all four countries than found in the climate change domain, reflecting perhaps the number of private foundations, pharmaceutical companies and NGO’s that are active supporters of HIV/AIDS research. In the gender domain (Figure 12), the non-government sector is relatively large in the USA, and very small in Brazil, suggesting, in the case of the USA, a significant level of private sector support for studies applying gender as a categorical var­ iable—for instance in studies measuring differential health status or workplace stigma (both very common topics in American science, medicine and social science). In each of the domains there were a variety of research funding instit­ utions involved between 2011 and 2016. In Australia, the major government agencies were the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the Australian Research Council (ARC), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and the Australian Department of the Environment. Foreign government agencies 116

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included the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, and the Natural Environment Research Council (UK). Private funding came from organisations such as the Herman Slade Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as corporations including Merck and CSL Biotherapies. In Brazil, the major government agencies were the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the Coordination for Improvement of Higher Education (CAPES), the Brazilian Ministry for Health, and the Sāo Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Foreign government agencies included the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Joint UN Programmes on HIV/AIDS, the European Union and the German Ministry of Education and Research. Private funding came from organisations such as the Ford Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. In South Africa, the major government agencies were the South African National Research Foundation (NRF), the Medical Research Council of South Africa, and the Department of Science and Technology. Foreign government agencies included the Saudi Wildlife Commission, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the European Research Council, the Swedish Research Council, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and the European Union. Private funding came from organisations such as the Trapnell Fund, the Leverhulme Trust, the Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, as well as biopharmaceutical corporations including GlaxoSmithKline and Abbott. In the United States, the major government agencies were the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA), the US Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Private funding came from organisations such as the Smithsonian, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the American Gastroenterology Association, the Ryan Licht Sang Foundation, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Wilderness Society, as well as corporations such as Astellas Pharma, Pfizer and Salix Pharmaceuticals. Foreign government agencies included the London School of Tropical Health and Hygiene, the Ministry for Science and Education (Poland) and Shandong University (China). 117

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Research Collaboration and the Three Domains

Manuscripts in our database contain information about whether the research was a collaborative effort, and whether this collaboration involved researchers from other institutions or countries. This data shows that the extent to which there is research collaboration across national borders and between institutions varies between the four countries during the period 2011 and 2016. The highest level of cross-national collaboration is found in South Africa (42 per cent or 182/437 of manuscripts), followed by the USA (41 per cent or 216/524), Australia (34 per cent or 153/453), and Brazil (14 per cent or 55/408). The low level of international collaboration in Brazil suggests the presence of language barriers in accessing the international domain, while the high level of international collaboration in South Africa indicates the success of its policy to improve research performance through attracting research partners. Examining the matter of cross-institutional collaboration, the highest level of cross-institutional collaboration is found among the papers from the USA (74 per cent or 389/524 of manuscripts), followed by Australia (65 per cent or 295/453), South Africa (62 per cent or 269/437), and Brazil (56 per cent or 229/408). The low level of collaboration in Brazil possibly reflects its larger proportion of state institutions and its centralised education system, where there is less incentive for collaboration.

Country of PhD—Local or Foreign?

The database also contains information about whether the first author of each manuscript completed their PhD in their own country or elsewhere. Surprisingly, scholars in our Southern tier countries (who published journals indexed by WoS between 2011 and 2016) almost unanimously completed their PhDs in their own countries. Ninety-nine per cent of the first authors of these manuscripts completed their PhDs in their own countries. This compares with a lower figure for the manuscripts from the USA, where 86 per cent (or 348/406) of the authors completed their PhDs in the USA. The high level of local PhDs in our three Southern tier countries suggests that while previous generations of scholars were forced to travel overseas to complete PhDs due to the lack of training facilities in their own countries; current scholars have access to satisfactory programs and are able to complete their education locally. Indeed local training is the obvious solution for a population with a growing educated middle class, but without the funds to attend the prestigious but highly expensive global North institutions. Here the effect of past social investment in higher education in 118

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the Southern-tier countries is visible. We must, however, be aware of differences within the global South, between those countries which can, and those which cannot afford a substantial university system. We must also be aware of socioeconomic differences within countries.

Summary This chapter has provided a statistical map of the three domains across several countries from 1980 to 2015–16. We’ve seen the enormous growth in knowledge production over recent decades, but also noted the much greater growth in production among the physical, life and biomedical sciences, with the arts, humanities and social sciences participating to a lesser degree. The mapping process has also demonstrated the much greater presence of Northern scholars and their institutions in the international arenas of knowledge—and indicated the domination of this international arena by publishers and journals from the global North. Our analysis has clarified some of the important differences between the three domains as represented in the WoS data base. All came into form­ation only from the 1980s, and all are statistically dominated by the physical, life and biomedical sciences; although the gender domain has the strongest social science component of the three. The three domains are also statistically dominated by publications from the United States, though England and Germany are also substantial producers of knowledge. The recent influx of Chinese scholars into the three domains disturbs the otherwise global North–South pattern, but at the same time confirms the critical importance—for all countries—of participating in the global scholarly knowledge production system. The mapping of the knowledge production system reveals significant variations in the funding regimes from one country to the next, and var­ iation also between the domains, pointing to the different opportunities and challenges faced by scholars and other knowledge workers in various social, political and geographic positions. In all three domains the vast proportion of scholarly knowledge is paid for by governments, whether these are national governments or inter-government agencies such as the World Health Organization. Private sector, non-government funding is minimal, though largest in the United States, and most predominant in the HIV/ AIDS domain where private foundations and non-profit organisations have become strong supporters of knowledge about the epidemic, its solutions and its impacts. 119

C H A P TE R FI V E

Circulating Knowledge This chapter explores the circulation of intellectual knowledge, revealing the highly skewed global market for academic, scholarly publications. Here we draw primarily on empirical material from our interviews with academic publishers, editors and university research managers across five countries, to offer insights into the impact of this market on publishers, universities, research institutions and researchers in the global South. Inequality is thus a major theme explored in this chapter, for we reveal the precarious nature of Southern publishing and the many challenges to be faced in the heterogeneous social, political and economic contexts of some of the countries of the global South. The final section of the chapter highlights responses to the intellectual hegemony of the North in the publishing industry, and the strategies that have been developed, or are emerging, in the global South to manage local or national development in a rapidly shifting context.

The Publishing Industry and the University Sector Knowledge workers in our universities and associated research centres have increasingly been drawn into the capitalist economy, and their practices commodified. Their ‘products’ are multiple, including the search for ‘truth’, contributions to knowledge and public debate, to education, the creation of new technologies, and expert services for governments, industries and communities. Yet it is the production of publications (journals, journal art­ icles, books) that has, along with education services, recently captured the attention of the capitalist market. Books, journal articles and the journals themselves have become new sources of profit for capitalist industries, and this radical development has not escaped the notice of university managers and higher education policy communities, where the response has been to implement major institutional ‘reform’. There are two arenas on which we should focus if we are to adequately understand these developments: changes in the publishing industry, and changes in the universities themselves.

Circulating Knowledge

The Publishing Industry

Focusing first of all on developments in the publishing sector for academic, scholarly texts, the most noticeable shift has been from a series of small, informally organised, local or national outfits—essentially a cottage industry—to a global market of major publishers operating transnationally. In its cottage industry phase, journals were primarily produced within the faculties and departments of the universities, and financed by small grants from these same faculties or their professional associations. Likewise, publishers of scholarly books were often small, private (even family owned) businesses, or alternatively non-profit presses attached to universities, professional societies or academies. At the mid-twentieth century, the majority of journals were still being published by the scientific societies (Larivière, Haustein and Mongeon 2015: 3). By the mid-1990s, 40 per cent of journal output came from commercial presses, and the trend toward commercialisation and commodification has continued—though the extent to which journals are published by the large commercial publishers varies from one country, and discipline, to another. Digitalisation itself has not changed this trend (Larivière et al. 2015: 4). Journals and small book producers, many struggling to remain viable as funds from universities rapidly diminished and academic workloads intensified, were progressively purchased by for-profit establishments (Collyer 2016: 6). And in becoming part of the global marketplace, the companies themselves have been subjected to the normal processes of capitalism: mergers and takeovers of the smaller establishments and competitors. These processes of commodification and marketisation have had a number of consequences. Important has been the creation of a handful of massive publishing conglomerates with transnational reach, with the top ten world publishers—by 2015—accounting for 54 per cent of all revenue generated (Publishers Weekly 2015). Another way to state this is that 50 per cent of papers in the natural sciences, and 50 per cent in the social sciences, are now in the hands of the top five publishers (Larivière et al. 2015: 10). Important also has been the fact that 70 per cent (or 40/57) of these top companies have their headquarters in the countries of North America or Europe (Publishers Weekly 2015). The formation of this new capitalist market has meant a rapid shift of control away from the knowledge producers themselves. For example, while many academics and other knowledge workers have continued to edit the scholarly journals, commercial publishers now control much of the publication process, determining the journals’ format and style, the number of issues and papers to be published, the 121

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inclusion of review papers or book reviews, copyright and licensing matters, and procedures for managing complaints, submissions and reviews. This has meant the increasing standardisation of journals, generally following the model of the American journal (Collyer 2016:6). Examples can readily be found of how the introduction of new capitalist processes into the industry have changed the knowledge-making practices of researchers, academics and students. For instance, discovery processes have altered, so that scholars increasingly use commercial indexes to locate mat­ erial, overlooking papers or books that have not been selected by the major indexing companies—which means that a journal’s presence on the index is increasingly significant (Collyer 2016:7). Likewise, while university libraries once purchased journals and books directly from the major, high status publishers on an annual basis, supplemented by requests from faculty for individual items; there is now increasing reliance on specialised organis­ ations to provide a selection service. These list a package of ‘appropriate’ journals or books to libraries and other institutions, offering them for use under single or multi-user licences. Some are for-profit companies, for example, University Press Scholarship Online or UPSO, which is owned by Oxford University Press and offers packages of eBooks by discipline type to libraries around the world. Others are not-for-profit, such as JSTOR, which is tax-payer funded but nevertheless not a free service, charging subscriptions for access. JSTOR sells packages of both journals and eBooks. Whether forprofit or not-for-profit, these aggregation organisations make decisions about the content of the packages in accordance with their commercial interests (although they may take advice from both the libraries and the marketing departments of publishers). It is a very different way of selling journals and books to libraries, and a major ‘evolution’ according to one of the publishers we interviewed [Karen, Editorial Director, university press, USA]. This form of outsourcing has benefits, says Gabrielle [manager, university press, Australia], because it ‘gives us more time to do what we’re here to do—which is to publish books’. The less positive side of the development is that the large publishing houses and aggregation companies can more readily monopolise the industry and dominate the sector. As Tom, a small independent Australian publisher informs us, some of the companies are so large they are able to ‘make decisions about price increases, for example, that completely wipe out the budgets of libraries that are their main customers’. This can create ‘ill will’ between the libraries and the big publishers, particularly when it puts licensing and subscription rates beyond the reach of less wealthy institutions (many of which are in the global South). 122

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The globalisation of publishing has also had both positive and neg­ative consequences for academics and other scholars. A positive outcome of the internet and electronic forms of publishing and indexing has been the increased capacity for researchers to build a global profile, drawing them into a global network of knowledge producers, distributing their work more widely and making it more visible. This has been particularly beneficial for Southern researchers, for whom the cost of access to networks based almost entirely on postage, telephone, print journals and face-to-face presence at meetings, was highly prohibitive. Less positive has been the entrenchment of global technological and commercial developments into what was already a competitive system, enhancing existing geo-political inequalities for those with fewer resources. The impact of all these changes on the academics and scholars needs also to be emphasised, because as the capacity of academics and scholars to select sources of material has rapidly decreased, the level of control exerted by the commercial operators has increased. This has important implications for the content of the knowledge being produced under the new regime, and for the quality of that knowledge.

The University Sector

Significant changes have occurred within the universities over the same period, compounding the effects of changes wrought directly by the cap­ italist market (Collyer 2014b). Primary among these has been the growing demand for more skilled and educated populations which has reinforced the notion of universities as mechanisms for national development—a feature of previous eras, and notable for instance in the development of Australian universities and university departments from the 1940s (see Connell 2015; Collyer 2017). The shifting focus from universities as sites of learning and education, and as repositories of scholarship, to ‘factories’ producing ‘training’ in essential skills, is confirmed by the widespread replacement of the word ‘university’ with that of ‘higher education institution’ (Collyer 2013: 3). Competition for the ‘products’ of these institutions, and indeed between the institutions themselves, has developed rapidly, and we now have an aggressive global market within which all products, and the universities themselves, are positioned hierarchically across the globe according to wealth, prestige and global reach. This radical change has been named ‘Academic Capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Bok 2003; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Rhoades 2005; Mendoza and Berger 2008; Szelényi and Bresonis 2014). Crucial to the hierarchical ordering of institutions and 123

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products has been the development of new tools to rank and measure ‘quality’ and ‘output’ from the universities. Two types of tools have been most evident: bibliometric measures and university rankings. Bibliometric analysis offers a quantitative indicator of a set of articles/ reports/reviews. One of the more common forms is citation analysis, which provides an indication of the relationship between documents, that is, how often a given manuscript has been cited in other manuscripts. Citation analysis yields ‘impact factors’, which can be applied to individual articles or to the journals that house them. The impact factor is simply the frequency with which an article has been cited within a particular time frame, or the frequency with which articles within a given journal have been cited. Papers and journals with higher impact scores are broadly assumed to be of better quality. Perhaps unsurprisingly in this market-dominated era, impact scores have become tied to an individual’s promotion and appointment prospects in the academic job market. University rankings, the second tool to emerge in the new knowledge system, refers to a development in the evaluation of both disciplines and universities. Rankings purport to offer ‘objective’ indicators of the quality and performance of a university, department or discipline. National ranking systems came well before the global ones. The first version to attract significant attention was produced by the US News and World Report in 1983, and applied to the ranking of American colleges. Global ranking systems were produced somewhat later, and the first of these came from the Shanghai Jiao Tong Institute in 2003, in the form of an annual set of league tables across the world university sector (Marginson 2009: 22). There are now several, quite different global systems operating, including the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the Quacquarelli Symonds system. Each ranking system has its own set of assumptions, and is therefore more favourable to certain types of universities and disciplines. For instance, the Times ranking is more favourable toward Australian institutions (Collyer 2013: 4). Marginson and van der Wende (2007: 309) suggest the acceptance and legitimacy of these ranking systems was assured across the world university sector because they did not challenge the existing status order of the universities, continuing to rank the American and British universities—including Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford—at the apex of the system. Critics argue that the ranking systems measure the prestige and wealth of the institutions rather than quality per se (Usher 2009). This certainly appears to be the case in Australia, where the highest ranked universities 124

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are the ‘sandstones’, that is, the earliest universities to be established (and built of sandstone, as was the fashion in nineteenth century Australia), and the wealthiest in terms of assets and research income (Marginson 1999: 18–20). Moreover, looking globally, it is apparent that the measurement of ‘performance’ has itself become an industry, competitively controlled by a handful of key players (Moutsios 2010: 122,125). Its beneficiaries are, on the one hand, the corporate players behind the development of the measurement tools (whether this be copyright laws and procedures, intellectual property or ranking systems of various kinds) (Drahos and Braithwaite 2002: 11); and on the other hand, the high ranking, longestablished, wealthy and prestigious institutions of the countries of the global North. Criticism of the bibliometrics system itself has also been widespread, with studies showing, for example, that citation indices measure the extent of integration into scientific networks rather than the quality of a paper or journal (Hargens and Schuman 1990); are gender biased (Ward, Gast and Grant 1992); highly dependent on the field or even sub-field, with very different citation practices in each (Lewison and Dawson 1998); and dependent on the size of the field, because small fields attract fewer cit­ ations (King 1987). Bibliometric tools consequently put disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences at a distinct disadvantage relative to the natural and life sciences. One of our participants, Aletta, from a South African university, suggested that bibliometrics and the league tables have raised awareness of the global context in which the universities operate: We all know [they] are completely biased and unreliable and a bit ridiculous—but they’re a reality, and I think because we live in a society that responds well to quick fixes in a way, instant coffee and instant solutions, the rankings give you an instant picture of an institution… it’s risky for an institution to ignore them completely… we have been engaging with them in an on-going manner as an institution… making the case for the indicators having to be more nuanced, not accommodating the social sciences and the humanities in the same way that the STEM disciplines are accommodated… we know them for what they are but we can’t afford to ignore them.

The metrics with which universities the world over must deal, have radic­ ally changed the landscape of knowledge production, encouraging univers­ ities to reduce or cut whole areas of endeavour, to create new departments 125

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and only fund forms of knowledge production that enhance their rankings. With regard to the impact on individual knowledge workers, Erne (2007: 307) argues that because these metrics fail to capture all aspects of their work (and indeed it is unlikely that any system of metrics could achieve this, given the heterogeneity of tasks and roles of the average academic); they don’t improve the performance of academic workers but instead merely encourage a re-distribution in effort, time and attention among these tasks and roles as individuals strive to meet the criteria of the metrics. These new metric tools that quantify knowledge products and academic practices are compatible with the processes of neoliberalism, and these, in association with the introduction of capitalism into the world of academia, have dramatically transformed what was once a cottage industry into a transnational, global enterprise. This global economy of knowledge is having an impact on all areas of knowledge production: a production system in which all facets are linked. For instance, the commodification of scholarly knowledge and the competitive race to improve the relative rank of the institutions has placed unprecedented pressure on academics and researchers to significantly escalate their publication ‘output’. As we demonstrated in Chapter Four, this pressure has produced an extraordinary growth in academic, scholarly publications. It is a recent development. It has largely occurred since the 1980s. Likewise, institutions are increasingly using metrics (such as impact factors and citation counts) as proxies for quality and merit in their consideration of promotion, appointment or the funding of grant applications. This has changed the incentive structures within the institutions and brought pressure on academics to focus on their publication ‘outputs’. For many, this means producing journal articles rather than text books, monographs or book chapters. It is essentially the imposition of a medical/scientific model of publication onto the humanities and social sciences, where books and book collections (either edited or authored) were previously given a higher value than the journal article. Within this general trend, there have of course been some variations across societies with regard to the kind of publications that are most valued. As Natasha, a journal editor and academic from the USA tells us, ‘the publishing cultures are somewhat country specific, what counts is country specific’. In some countries (and disciplines) the prestige of the publisher remains paramount, where elsewhere the number of publications produced by a given author or the identity of the journal in which the articles are published continues to take precedence. Despite these remnants of traditional 126

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practice, an increasingly common factor is the use of bibliometric measurement, and given that such measures have, until recently, only been available through indexes owned and controlled by institutions and organisations of the global North; restricted to journals (books and other materials are only now beginning to be added); and restricted to journals that are owned by the major publishers; the overwhelming trend has been a picture of Northern domination in all domains of knowledge.

The Impact of Commodification on Scholars and the Institutions Our interviews with editors, publishers and research managers provides a set of unique insights into the impact of the global commodification of academic publishing on scholars, universities and the publishers themselves. To focus, in the first instance, on the effect this has had on the scholars and academics, it is fruitful to read the reflections of William, an academic and editor of a major journal in the USA: When I arrived at college in the 1960s, American universities were not being all things to all people. They were not trying to be major engines of social democracy, and major trainers of public policy people and engines of industrial research and this kind of stuff. They were pretty much educational institutions that were at the top very much involved in producing an elite, that was about producing people who kind of knew a lot of the same stuff so they could get along together and this sort of thing. And now they are involved in many many different things… it is a very successful institution and so inevitably lots and lots of other social functions get piled on it and basically the institutions are breaking down under the strain, that is what is happening.

For William, this institutional strain has a number of consequences for academics, because, for one thing, the growing pressure to publish leaves insufficient time for careful reading of the work of others. He tells us that in the 1970s, most academics did not publish, but spent their working hours reading and teaching, ‘now of course they can’t read because there is so much stuff published you can’t think about reading’. This concerns William because it has an effect on the quality of the knowledge produced: Fifteen years ago you could count on it that people were not trying to publish stuff twice, now you can’t—you have to assume that you know 127

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER people publish very close to the same model with a slightly different theory and two or three different variables in some other journal and they are just doing it again. You really have to worry about that [William, journal editor and academic, USA].

The pressure to publish a large quantity of articles, rather than spend time on improving the quality of the articles, was noted by the majority of our participants. Of concern also were other changes to the ‘rules of the game’: new expectations governing what should be published and where their manuscripts should be published. Phillip, an editor and academic in Hong Kong, explained that his students are encouraged to publish in the international journals, because publishing in Chinese in the local journals is not valued by the university, and is not helpful for their careers. Kevin, also an editor and academic in Hong Kong, expressed a similar view, stating that while there are some relatively pres­ tigious journals ‘in the context of mainland China… if they were thinking of their careers they would publish in British or American journals [because] the university orients… to what it calls the global reach’. The situation is similar in Brazil. Bertrand, an editor, publisher and academic, informs us that academics no longer have much input into the evaluation processes that determine the funding of their programmes (e.g., the graduate programmes), research projects, and career progress. All these facets of intellectual life are now determined by a bureaucratic process, and based primarily on the ‘output’ of a programme or the standing of an academic’s publication profile, which are themselves determined through the bibliometric system. Academics are invited onto promotion or appointment committees, but the quality of the candidate’s contribution is no longer assessed through qualitative means (such as interviews or public lectures) but by quantitative, bibliometric tools. The commodification of knowledge products and the institution of bibliometric tools have encouraged this focus on attaining publication in the ‘top journals’ (which are mostly owned by the major publishing compan­ ies and the institutions of the global North). This publication strategy has rapidly become essential for career development, because an international profile cannot easily be created without a presence in the journals where a concentration of scholars in the global North will read and cite their work. As can be seen from our discussion of the labour process in Chapter Three of this book, many of our participants discussed this problem. They told us that scholars from the US are quite uninterested in reading articles or 128

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books that originate from countries other than America itself, and do not read non-American journals: America is a little bit different. They stay in their own country. They don’t look outside of their country because it’s such a big country they don’t really need to… [The Americans] don’t need to know what Australia is doing or Europe or anywhere else… they don’t care because it’s them. As opposed to us—we want to know what everyone is doing. We investigate, we research, we develop, we look at all those things… [Gabrielle, manager, university press, Australia].

There are of course, scholars in America who conduct comparative research, but even here the tendency is to read the work of Americans who have studied other societies, rather than directly seek out ‘foreign’ works on the subject. This pattern of intraversion, where scholars are inwardly focused and suspicious of knowledge from sources external to their own country (Collyer 2016: 9), was even commented on by our American participants. For example Helene, an American medical doctor, says the ‘Europeans tend to have a more global outlook than Americans do’; and Miles, a journal editor and academic from the US, explains that there has yet to be an internationalisation of ‘elite American sociology’. While there are Americans who travel or take up overseas appointments for short periods, the public­ ation system has not changed: I mean, if somebody showed up in the British Journal of Sociology we’d sort of recognise that was esteemed but it’s very hard… sociology is becoming palpably more global in my time in the discipline, but it’s not at that point yet where we know how to evaluate European journals [Miles, journal editor and academic, USA].

For Miles, and several other American participants, British and European journals are ‘foreign’. Journals situated in the global South are completely beyond contemplation. Such a response adds further evidence to existing quantitative assessments of the different citing practices of scholars from the North and South. Such studies demonstrate the way Northern scholars are self-citing and inward-focused, while scholars in the South are extraverted, and direct their attention to the publications of the North (Danell 2013; Collyer 2014a). This evidence suggests the different citation practices between scholars of the North and South have been in place for some time. However the recent commodification of intellectual knowledge and 129

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the radical changes to the universities have significantly exacerbated these tendencies. Altered publication practices not only include the targeting of inter­ national journals but a shift in emphasis toward journal articles rather than book chapters or text books. This has been a direct result of commercial decisions made by the indexing companies about what to include in the biblio­metric citation system, and compounded by the organisations that provide world rankings of the institutions—because these latter have relied on bibliometric tools. Given that, in many countries, book chapters and text books fail to be ‘counted’ as measures of performance for either individ­ uals or the ranking of institutions, researchers and academics have had to focus on the production of articles for the international journals. Helen, an Australian publisher, sees this as very destructive of the university sector: It’s well known there’s a sort of lip service paid to teaching and pedagogy in universities but what really drives universities is ranking. What drives ranking is citations of articles, research articles… I think for a long time it’s been the case that the publishing output that has been most valued is that which reaches the smallest readership, so in other words a journal article in a peer-reviewed… high ranked journal which… are actually read by 20 or 30 people… that is frequently or routinely valued much more highly than a research-based work of quality that would reach very large numbers of people. This is totally perverse and it’s a scientific publishing model which is being inflicted on other disciplines in ways that are wildly inappropriate for the way those disciplines work. That’s not new. It’s just been amplified… the fact that text book authorship is so poorly valued in universities and in favour of the publication of research articles which will be read by tiny numbers of people and in the context of an explosion of publishing… but the de-valuing of text books as an outcome of pedagogical expertise and to an extent research, depth of research and research experience is immensely damaging and is going to—like many of the other things that are going on, we’re going to be paying for this for generations to come [Helen, publisher, independent press, Australia].

Commodification has also exacerbated existing language divisions among knowledge workers. Olivier, a publisher in Brazil, refers often to the ‘hierarchical world of publishing’, where individuals are pressured to publish ‘internationally’ (which means in the prestigious American journals), to research issues of ‘international’ interest (which means about subjects 130

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that will be of interest to American or British reviewers and editors), and to write for ‘international audiences’ (which means writing in English). The issue of language inequalities is a significant one being faced by the majority world. While the pressure to write in English has, in some cases, widened the audiences for scholars working in small language communities; it has, for many others, made it more difficult to undertake scholarship. Kevin, an academic and editor in Hong Kong, discussed the difficulties faced by academics and scholars working in the global South, particularly where English is not their first language: …it is not prolifically easy for a number of reasons. I mean because for most of my colleagues English is not a first language, well for none of my colleagues English is a first language, so the majority of them when they write articles have to pay an editor to just check writing style. I mean it is a real undertaking, I don’t think we appreciate how difficult it is for people who don’t have English as a native language to write and publish in international journals… the costs are really high for them… It is like all of that stuff on workingclass kids have to do so much better than middle class kids to get to university. Well Chinese language people have to do so much more to get published.

In large part, the costs of translation fall on the individual academics, who must decide whether to build an international career through English publications, or focus on creating a local reputation (Hanafi 2011). Some pursue a double strategy, attempting to write in English as well as their own language, and to publish in English-language journals as well as their local journals. The costs are high whichever strategy is pursued. On the one hand, too many non-English publications means ‘they won’t get promoted… Promotion is based on getting research grants and publication, journal publication in good outlets’ [Kevin, editor, academic, Hong Kong]. On the other hand, pursuing publication in the English-language journals, and particularly in the high impact journals of the global North, means that the financial costs of translations are left with the individual: [Language] is not managed by the journal at all, it is seen as the responsibility of the individual author… international publishers don’t see as a problem for them, that is why you know my colleagues and other people in the periphery spend a lot of money on editors, it is for them to fix [Kevin, editor, academic, Hong Kong]. 131

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The Costs of Commodification on Knowledge Production Few of our participants had anything positive to say about the changes to universities or the publication system. The majority regarded these as having damaged humanity’s capacity to build better, more useful know­ ledge. William put this clearly: …so much of the publication is should we say unnecessary… essentially the professional communication system has been hijacked by the function of evaluation. So people publish not because they have something to say, or because it is really important to their intellectual projects that they publish, they publish because they have to [journal editor and academic, USA].

Mary, a publisher from a university press in South Africa, also sees the current system as damaging. She claims the bibliometric citation system should be abandoned ‘because it’s racist and neo-colonial and we shouldn’t be participating in a measure like that’. More pointedly, Mary criticises government subsidies that are directed at academics to publish in inter­ national journals, saying that these are a ‘waste of money’, because they produce publications which are of little use to either South Africa or the South African government, but the universities are ‘happy to take the money… which I gather is a very big funding line and too important for them to let it go’. It is not difficult to see how processes of commodification have fundamentally altered—albeit in different ways—the institutional incentive structures within and between universities. Phillip, the editor and academic in Hong Kong, insightfully comments on this matter when he says that academics are now having to focus on ‘building their international profiles’, where once they would have been taking part in civil rights or social movements, teaching students or contributing to the management of the university itself. William states it more bluntly: What is happening is the whole thing is being driven by this external evaluation structure which basically comes from business, which is fundamentally stupid which is just completely idiotic, and it is basically destroying intellectual life, that is what is happening [William, journal editor and academic, USA].

Aletta, from South Africa, puts the spotlight on the institutional level when she speaks about the effect of seeking to improve the university’s 132

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placement in the ranking system. Fifteen years previously, her role was simply administrative she says, coordinating research development activ­ ities and planning some programmes. In the current situation, the research offices of universities are ‘different animals’, formulating and implementing strategies to attract international students and global partners. For Aletta, this alteration in institutional practices has exacerbated the contradiction between, on the one hand, universities striving for elite status, and on the other, addressing social problems—such as the glaring social inequalities of the country. Does the country put its scarce resources into the education of the black population and raise the status of universities with primarily black students, or does it fund one or two world class, high ranking universities that draw their students from other countries? There are other effects associated with universities ‘chasing rankings’ and individuals targeting high ranking, international journals to benefit their careers. Our participants from the global South were particularly aware of the way these linked practices have reduced the level of academic input into local debates and issues. Phillip and Kevin, both academics and editors in Hong Kong, tell us that these international journals don’t contribute in any way to the local community. If they are to be published in the British or American journals, articles must appeal to British or American readers and reviewers, and it is difficult to interest them in matters relevant to Hong Kong. Olivier, an editor and university press publisher in Brazil, puts the matter succinctly, and brings in the issue of language: What is local what is international? I receive journals from Oxford University Press and read about public health in a small village in Wales, this is international because it is in English, if they publish a study on health in a small village in Brazil it is local.

Helen believes the quality of the knowledge being produced under these twin pressures is being undermined: I think the circumstances under which academics work in universities these days are not, in many ways… conducive to producing good quality, well written, thoughtful [books]… they are under pressure both in terms of the amount of time they have available and the unreasonableness of the expectations on them… the incentives have been amplified to a degree that the outcome is perverse and this goes right through many aspects of academic publishing. So if we thought that academic research was designed to improve the volume and 133

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER quality of human knowledge and if we thought that the idea was to share that information that’s been uncovered in the most appropriate way with as wide a possible audience, many of the incentives that are in place for academics to do so are actually disincentives [Helen, publisher, independent press, Australia].

Most perturbing of all with regards the impacts on the quality of the knowledge being produced in this new global context are the changes being wrought through open access and aggregation. Open access is proposed as a more equitable means to encourage the widespread distribution of scholarly research knowledge. Conceived during the debates about the high cost of subscriptions to the high impact journals in the 1990s—particularly in the natural sciences and medicine—the publicly stated purpose behind open access is that research that has been paid for by public agencies should be publicly available rather than a commodity that primarily benefits the large publishing companies. There are varying forms of open access, but essentially authors can elect to place their article in an open access journal, or in a journal that has open access facilities, for a fee. Some journals require the fee to be paid initially, before review or publication. Others provide the option after review and the formal acceptance of the manuscript. The effect of open access has been to shift the costs of access from the reader/user of the article to the author, their institution or funding agency. The popularity of open access has varied quite a bit between disciplines, because some disciplines such as sociology have far less access to large research grants or institutional funds, while others such as the life sciences and medicine can more readily use part of their research funds to cover dissemination costs. Nevertheless, open access has rapidly become popular and a major feature of on-line academic publishing. Open access has had mixed effects on the production of knowledge and the producers of knowledge. Open access may be a preferred form of publication for some scholars because it makes research more accessible to individuals outside the university system, and those in the less wealthy universities where subscription costs are prohibitive. For others, open access is considered positively because in some fields at least, it is more likely to be cited. As Tom, an independent Australian publisher, says, ‘if it’s free, that is, if open access fees have been paid, then it’s more likely to be found and cited, because there’s no pay wall if it’s free—they can just find it’. However it has brought with it a number of concerns about the quality of the published work: 134

Circulating Knowledge It’s a minefield, open access, it’s certainly not a panacea, because the quality control is gone basically and the metrics for measuring quality have gone. So on two fronts it’s not delivering the panacea that people had hoped. The head of the ARC’s [Australian Research Council’s] stand is if the public has paid for it through research grants then the public should have it for free. I can understand their argument on one level and on the other level I’m thinking of all the quality control and value adding that goes into it between the raw research data and the distribution of the published article, it needs to be recognised and remunerated if the quality is going to be maintained, but he won’t listen to that [Tom, small independent publisher, Australia].

When Tom speaks of the elimination of ‘quality control’, he is referring to the fact that in many cases, papers are accepted in exchange for payment, rather than because they have merit. There are journals that provide an open access option only after the usual reviewing process has taken place, but others are essentially buying articles from those who can afford to pay. Open access has thus seen the proliferation of for-profit journals and also ‘predatory journals’. The latter are journals created for profit that have a website but fail to provide an adequate review process, may have false editors and editorial boards, and archiving systems that mean papers are generally not ‘discoverable’. [Beall’s List is worth examining to find out more about these journals, see beallslist.weebly.com]. Open access has therefore raised the number of publications that are of poor quality and of little merit, making it increasingly difficult for knowledge workers to locate high quality knowledge. Its development has occurred in combination with the processes of aggregation, where new types of companies have formed to make knowledge products (scholarly articles, books, reports and conference papers) more ‘discoverable’. As noted in an earlier section of the chapter, aggregation companies provide libraries and index companies with collections or packages of materials. But publishing companies also employ their own methods of aggregation, selling packages of the works to which they have rights. Many of the items in these packages may be indexed in SSCI, but others are included simply because the company holds their rights. This has meant that more material is now available to knowledge workers, but the benefits are outweighed by the fact that much of this material is of dubious quality. For many years, knowledge workers were trained (and socialised) into academic practices that provided a set of guidelines for ascertaining 135

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quality and importance. In the current context, commodification has brought aggregation, open access, for-profit journals, predatory journals, metrics, ranking and commercial index systems. The combination of these developments (and others that are not mentioned here for lack of space) is undermining long-established conventions, leaving scholarship in a state of growing disorder. Many of the established conventions were predicated on the hegemony of Northern scholarship, where ‘quality’ was associated with the practices determined by the prestigious journals and the high status, wealthy research and teaching institutions. While Northern hegemony has remained in place in the new environment, there has been a shift in the determination of knowledge production from the prestigious institutions, universities and professional societies of the global North, to the commercial entities (sometimes associated with specific institutions) of the global North. In the current context, knowledge production is less and less under the control of the prestigious journals and the high status, wealthy research and teaching institutions, and much more a product of the practices and decisions of for-profit, commercial entities that may mimic, but are not bound by the conventions and norms of the academic community.

The Impact of Commodification on ‘Southern’ Publishing We began this chapter with a brief glimpse at the state of academic publishing, demonstrating that it has come to be composed of many large, transnational conglomerates with their headquarters primarily in the global North, but with multiple subsidiaries in the global South. In the majority world, smaller, independent commercial operations and (often non-profit) university presses must compete with these subsidiaries for the publication of academic books and journals. In general, the trade in academic books is little different from the trade in other commodities, where trade routes were established over many centuries to favour the countries of the global North. Helen, a publisher of an independent press in Australia, tells us that it is difficult for presses in the global South to distribute their books into Britain, as Britain was set up as an export, not import market. In contrast, Gabrielle points out that the American book market has an enormous internal market. She attends the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) conference every two years and talks to many of the managers of the university presses in that country: The AAUP is so important to them because 200/300 presses turn up there for the week and they have their meetings and they go into their 136

Circulating Knowledge different sessions and learn what other universities are doing, but they don’t need to know what Australia is doing or Europe or anywhere else [Gabrielle, manager, university press, Australia].

The extensive internal market in the USA for academic texts and journals is, like Britain, relatively closed to imports, but the country has an even greater export market. Academic communities in Hong Kong for example, have adopted many American (rather than British) practices, and rely heavily on American text books and monographs. Phillip, an academic and editor in Hong Kong, says this is the case throughout East Asia, including Singapore. In South Africa, Charlotte, a publisher of a university press, points to the difficulties of distributing their books. They have contracts with distributers in both the UK and USA, but says they are lucky if they are able to sell 50 to 100 copies of a book into either of those countries. It is also really difficult for her to distribute into other countries of Africa. Her press sells small numbers of books into the Southern African Development Community (made up of 15 members, including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, and Zimbabwe), but many barriers to African trade exist. These include the many languages of Africa, the insecurity of the financial systems of many of the countries, and their unstable political and social systems. Mary, another South African publisher, discusses similar problems for her press, telling us that trade across Africa is impeded in many ways. ‘It’s a mixture of isolation and a consequence of the arbitrary boundaries of South African countries; plus tariff barriers, duty levies, currency difficulties. You might get something across a border but you might not be able to get the money back’. In many countries of the global South, language is a significant barrier to the circulation of academic books and journal articles. Although translations of academic works are technically possible, this is a very costly process. Few publishers in the global North bother with translations, publishing only in English. Where translations are conducted, it is generally from English into other languages (to sell more of the English books) rather than to bring non-English works to the English-speaking world. The cost of translation is high according to Karen, an editorial director of a major university press in the US, because each book has to be fully reviewed in both languages, and hence her press focuses only on major authors. Foreign Rights catalogues are produced and exchanged between publishers, offering lists and descriptions of the books for which the company holds inter­ national rights. Karen tells us that some books, for instance Thomas Piketty’s 137

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Capital in the Twenty-First Century, evoke a lot of interest from publishers wanting to translate them into various languages, and this ‘leads to healthy competition for translations’. The process is generally handled between the publishers rather than involving the authors: Some authors will, in their contract, negotiate for consultation rights over licenses, major licenses—which a translation would fall into. But no, very often our authors just get a notice that we have licensed rights, because part of their contract with us is that they want our rights department to work on their behalf [Karen, Editorial Director, university press, USA].

It is not the publishers of the global North who must bear the cost of translating books from English into other languages. One of the Brazilian university publishers told us: Our policy is we are Brazilian and Portuguese speaker community and for them we publish… Some books we have translations for Spanish but by contract only [where another press buys the rights to publish, perhaps for Mexico], we do not publish in another language… but we translate into Portuguese some books, it is an editorial board decision to translate some books [which originally have been] published in English or in Spanish… we buy the rights and translate into Portuguese… the editorial board say to us ‘ah this book is important…’ and we decide to translate… It is costly but we translate one or two, once a year… sometimes people ask us to publish in English [but] to publish in English in Brazil—who will read this? [we will] have piles of the books in our stock [unsold]… [Olivier, publisher, university press, Brazil].

With regard to academic journals, rather than books, the issues are a little different—though here too the costs are borne by those in the global South. The commercial indexes, which offer an aggregation of many journal publications as well as useful search tools, place pressure on journal editors (and their university departments or sponsoring societies) to publish articles in English. Olivier, our university press publisher from Brazil, tells us that although it varies somewhat according to the discipline or subject area, the use of platforms such as Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), requires the journals to publish 30 or 40 per cent of their articles in English. This is a particularly difficult issue for journal editors, not only because of 138

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the cost, but because journal articles need to be reviewed in their original language as well as in English. The process is complex, because there is a need for peer-reviewers who understand the field and its debates, but also reviewers who can speak both languages. Each article needs to be separ­ ately reviewed in each language, because examples or arguments are not always directly translatable, and the style of argument varies considerably across cultures. For the editor of a journal, this presents significant difficult­ ies in finding appropriate reviewers. According to Allessandra [academic, editor and journal publisher, Brazil], not only does the reviewer have to be a specialist in a specific field (e.g., Latin American Medieval history or Military Conquests of 17th century Spain), but they have to be fluent in the selected language. This considerably reduces what is often an already small field of specialists as potential reviewers for each article. Editors in Englishspeaking locales do not face this problem to the same extent. One response from the capitalist market to this increasing pressure to publish in English, has been a proliferation of companies providing translation and editorial services. A response from the governments of some countries of the global South, such as Brazil, has been to offer subsidies for the costs of translation and assist editors to publish their journals in English: …the main Brazilian agencies that support the public education, the public university in Brazil, that are trying to say that inter­ nationalisation it is almost a synonym for publishing in English… It is almost a question of publish only in English, so they are supporting the internationalisation of the journals, but only supporting the journals that publish in English, and I think this is a mistake… I can’t agree with this politics of associating the internationalisation of Brazil in social science with only publishing in English [Bertrand, editor, publisher, academic, Brazil].

Bertrand suggests that ideally, he would publish in both Portuguese and English so that his journal could reach a wider audience, but might also encourage non-Portuguese speakers to become familiar with, and partic­ ipate in debates that are important to Brazil. On-line publishing has reduced the cost of publishing, so that several versions of the same paper (in different languages) can be published, though this in itself does not reduce the cost of translation nor the difficulties of finding appropriate reviewers and translators. 139

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Strategies and Responses The global publication industry for academic books and journals is, as we have seen, highly unequal across the North/South divide. During our investigations, we learned of the various responses of governments and universities to this inequality, and investigated some of the strategies they had developed, or were developing, to counter the hegemony of the North. Two particular issues stand out here: the high cost of language translation, and the struggle to support local publishing in the face of the enormous quantity of materials from the North. With regards first of all to translation, several countries, including Brazil and South Africa, provide financial support to academics or university publishers for the translation of books/papers into English, which assists scholars to participate in the global scholarship system. However, most of the cost of translation falls to individual academics in the global South, and in general, the hegemony of the global North is not challenged because proportionally greater levels of funding appear to be available to support the university presses for the translation of English-language books into the local languages. With regards the issue of local academic publishing, one response is for governments and/or universities to provide subsidies to authors to assist with the costs of publishing. In Brazil for instance, authors commonly apply for public funding, and are able to take these funds to any publishing house. This strategy supports academic works that do not have a high market potential, and has the added effect of buttressing local presses. Another important response to the difficulties of sustaining publication for works of primarily local interest has been support for university presses. There are many types of university presses, some fully commercial and not owned by the university, others a part of the university itself, perhaps a division of its library. Some offer ‘trade’ books as well as scholarly books to provide an additional source of income, others rely heavily on subsidies from the university they are associated with, from their national governments or international aid agencies. The prestige of university presses varies considerably. They are highly esteemed in the US and the UK—relative to the trade presses—but often have less prestigious reputations elsewhere, such as in Brazil and Australia (though there is of course, some variation between disciplines and presses). Andrew, an academic and journal editor in the US, says, ‘When a young academic comes to me now and says should I publish with Sage or Palgrave or Macmillan I say well it depends, if you want a job 140

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in America you don’t publish with those people’. Nathan, another American journal editor and academic, is equally clear about the much higher prestige of the university press in the US: I think that in sociology at present in the US, people who don’t go with a university press for their first book do so at their peril… to assure your tenure process… then you want to make sure that your first book at least is with a university press, and ideally one of the most well-known ones. I think that after the first book there is much more latitude and there certainly should be, and I think that people who have tenure should feel empowered, ought to feel empowered to venture out beyond the domain of the university presses if they have material that is appropriate for that.

University presses that are attached to highly prestigious and wealthy universities have more capacity to operate without subsidies, and hence this is more likely to be the case in the global North. Karen, a publisher from a university press in the USA was forthcoming about the importance of the university: …the reputation of the press’ list as a whole matters quite a bit and certainly the reputation of the parent institution… we certainly have a level of access to authors because of the reputation of the university. And also the resources of the university are part of the resources that we also can draw on as a press, you know world class library with special collections—and so there is a lot of synergy there.

University presses are often promoted as having better editorial pro­cedures, focusing on producing high quality books, while the trade presses are regarded as offering superior distribution and circulation facilities. Some of the trade presses, says Helen, are simply ‘sausage machines’. They do little in the way of editing the books, they just print them: They provide a certain kind of service. You shovel in the documents at one end and they come out, thanks to digital publishing, as books at the other end with nary a hand upon them. It’s a form of dissemination. If the academic community thinks that’s valuable that’s up to the academic community but in many cases you’re seeing work that has potential not realise its potential. In other cases it’s probably a good home for it. At least it gets out there and it’s available to some degree, but it’s immensely difficult for librarians then to work 141

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER out what they should buy and what they shouldn’t buy and it’s also very difficult for other scholars to work out what they should and shouldn’t read because of the volume of this stuff [Helen, publisher, independent press, Australia].

University presses are expected to function in various, and often contradictory ways. Many university managements expect their press to showcase the work of the scholars of the university itself, and promote the university in a way that will bring funds (e.g. international students or research partners) and improve global rankings. If it is to fulfil this mission, university presses generally can’t make decisions about potential manuscripts on the basis of their likely commercial viability, and hence must be adequately subsidised—particularly if they are in the smaller academic markets of the global South which tend to have less highly developed export channels for scholarly goods: It’s not profitable to run a scholarly press, and that therefore can’t be the main reason for a scholarly press to exist. The reason must be dissemination of knowledge, of developed knowledge, of developed arguments. And I suppose also to highlight research work of particular academics at a certain institution. So currently all university presses are funded in some way either by the institution or by government, various models. In Germany the university presses are regarded as non-profit organisations, so they don’t pay tax and that assists. In Canada some university presses are given a percentage of the university’s total budget to exist. There are permutations in between [Charlotte, publisher, university press, South Africa].

Aside from the university presses, another strategy to increase local (and Southern) academic publishing has been to support the development of alternative publishing circuits. Over the past two to three decades, academic communities and university managements have become aware of the extent to which their communities are dominated by Northern knowledge products, and the way their own practices reflect the widespread acceptance of the authority of the academy of the global North. Efforts to shift their extraverted, Northern focus, have been hampered by the many challenges of their position in the global South, not least, according to Mary (a publisher from a South African university press), as a result of the overt strat­ egies of the ‘American publishers and American copyright industries trying to protect themselves from what was a hugely competitive market’. These, 142

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she says, sought to counteract the growing strength of the Indian publishers in South Africa and other Southern countries in the text book markets of the 1990s, by spreading fictions about India as ‘a den of piracy and iniquity and thievery’. Nevertheless, there has been a growing conviction that countries of the South should explore the potential for South-South partnerships as well as, or perhaps instead of, gazing toward the North. This has resulted in a number of alternative, trans regional or transnational circuits of publication, including a pan-African and a Latin American circuit, as well as several scientific indexes that offer substitutes for the main indexes, or perhaps as a supplement to these. These alternative circuits disseminate knowledge from the developing countries, and, in the process, help to produce a sense of shared community across regions or cross-nationally, encouraging participants to adopt new identities such as ‘pan-African’ or ‘Latin American’. One of the more important of these developments has been the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). In an effort to build a transnational circuit of knowledge across the many countries of Africa, CODESRIA was established in 1973 in Senegal by researchers, academics and African intellectuals (http://‌codesria‌.org). The Council focuses on the dissemination of knowledge from the humanities and social sciences. Both African and international bodies provide funding, including philanthropic agencies such as the Ford Foundation, foreign governments (Denmark and the Netherlands) and the United Nations. CODESRIA is one of the largest publishers in Africa, with at least 12 peer-reviewed journals in its stable (including Africa Development and African Sociological Review), and producing about 40 research monographs annually. Equally important has been funding for programmes from international bodies such as the United Nations. For instance, United Nations’ resources have been used to create networks across ‘Southern’ countries and between the ‘South’ and the ‘North’. Within the climate change domain of know­ ledge production, an organisation called SouthSouthNorth (SSN) was created in 1999, as a partnership between institutions in the Netherlands, France, Brazil, South Africa, Bangladesh and Indonesia. More recently, as part of a consortium, SSN built the Climate and Development Knowledge Network with GBP60 million in funding. This led to the formation of the collaborative Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) programme based at the University of Cape Town with the aim of enhancing 143

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indigenous research capacity and an evidence base for the transition to low-carbon societies. Participants in our study discussed the ways in which these networks were changing the previous North/South division in climate change research: Historically, research was mainly driven by developed countries, but I think that is changing very much. That has been one of my bigger surprises when I moved from [Europe] to here… I always had that feeling that we were doing much breakthrough work up there, and it’s not the case at all. I think that still the research capacity in Europe is much higher—there’s more money, there are more people etc.—but especially in the public sector, there’s much more happening in developing countries than in developed countries… It’s being seen as part of the core business of ensuring development in developing countries… for me, coming here and working with the Brazilians, the Chileans, the Colombians, the Bolivians, the South Africans has been kind of an eye-opener (Amanda, climate change, South Africa).

Another strategic development has been the establishment of alternative venues for distributing books and book rights. While many publishers the world over head to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, some make their way to the Guadalajara International Book Fair. This book fair was founded by the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and has been operating since 1987. It is the largest market in the world for Spanish-language public­ ations, attracting about 2,000 publishers from 40 countries each year. For Olivier (publisher/editor, Brazil), the Guadalajara Book Fair is much more important than Frankfurt, for the latter has a focus on English texts and makes it difficult for Brazilians to sell their own books. The Guadalajara Book Fair greatly extends the reach of Olivier’s books beyond Brazil, Portugal and Spain, which are his main countries of distribution. Karen, a university press publisher in the global North, also spoke of the import­ ance of the Guadalajara Book Fair for building her list profile. Although translations are not a large part of the list—for they are ‘very expensive undertakings’—they are an important part of it, and she ‘occasionally’ finds works in Spanish or other European languages that can be translated into English once the rights are bought from the foreign press (Karen, publisher, USA). Such developments hold the potential for raising the visibility of Southern scholarship and extending its global distribution. It needs to be 144

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noted however, that this potential is in tension with the opposite dynamic— raising the possibility of further entrenching the North/South divide, as internal programmes do not, in themselves, challenge intraversion. That is, they do not encourage scholars of the North to engage with Southern knowledges.

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Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge In the earlier chapters of this book we outlined the global economy of knowledge and traced the form it has taken in the three domains of know­ ledge in our study. In this chapter we link these issues to a central problem. How do Southern tier intellectual workers in the new domains deal with the global economy of knowledge, and how does their activity make and re-shape that economy? We start by examining the processes that have constructed hegemonic patterns in the new domains. It is very important to realise that a hegemonic situation does not simply mean domination, nor does it imply passivity. On the contrary we emphasise the agency of intellectual workers in the Southern tier, their active involvement in the making of knowledge instit­ utions and new domains of knowledge. We see them grappling with the contradictions and difficulties set up by the global economy, and we explore their strategies of coping and transformation. Finally we examine the innovations and alternatives that have emerged in the three domains.

Instituting Hegemony in New Domains The creation of the new domains studied in this book did not directly disturb the long-established centrality of the global metropole in the economy of knowledge. This historic pattern can be seen in the formation of the new domains, traced in Chapter Two, and in the broad quantitative patterns of publication and citation, set out in Chapter Four. The creation of the new domains did not immediately change the pattern of extraversion, described in Chapter Three, in the practices of knowledge workers in the Southern tier. This empirical conclusion, however, can easily be misinterpreted. It was not a question of Northern dominance being imposed from outside. Instituting the new domains was a complex and often subtle process in which knowledge workers in the Southern tier countries were active

Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge

players. Hierarchy re-emerged because new global domains were built up in ways that gave centrality to institutions of the global North, and because research in these domains in the periphery was generally conducted using concepts and methodologies brought from the North. In the interview passages that discuss the history and structure of the domains, three dimensions of hegemony are persistently mentioned: resource inequality; the formation of the research workforce; and the intellectual structure of the new domains. Most of our interviews with researchers mention, or imply, material inequalities, especially in the availability of funds or trained people. It is notable how strongly this issue emerges from Brazil, South Africa and Australia, none of which is a poor country. Igor (climate change, Brazil), gave a long and detailed account of his early formation as a scientist, tracing his undergraduate work in Brazil, and being sent by his seniors to the metropole to do a PhD. Later, discussing his involvement in policy work, he observed that when he had returned, his arrival made a grand total of six atmospheric scientists with PhDs in the whole country. Such contrast with the scene in Europe and North America is a common theme in the interviews. In all three domains, Northern journals became the communication nodes for the new field. Harold (climate change, South Africa), who like Igor was locally trained, gained a PhD in the metropole, and came back to a senior job, replied to a question about publishing in local journals: We weren’t going for African journals because they are just not highprofile enough, to be honest. So you want to be publishing either in the leading specialist journals, which are like Journal of Climate and Journal of Geophysical Research, or if you’re lucky, in Nature or Science… that’s the strategy. When one’s doing global-scale work, I didn’t see the point of publishing in South African journals.

Resource inequality is not static. There have been significant flows of aid from the North, benefiting Brazil and South Africa though not Australia. Gender studies in Brazil, as noted in Chapter Two, was launched as an academic field with significant assistance from the Ford Foundation (Grossi 2004). But the assistance itself can become a powerful vehicle of metropolitan influence. The gender studies journals funded by Ford in Brazil set about translating the work of US gender theorists into Portuguese, making them available for undergraduate teaching as well as research design. Climate 147

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change expertise in Brazil was developed through projects like ABLE, the Amazon Boundary Layer Experiment, in the mid-1980s. This was funded by the US space agency NASA, partnered with Brazilian institutions, and used US remote-sensing technology from satellites and over flights as well as balloons and towers to collect samples for chemical analysis. Australia, South Africa and Brazil all have university systems with advanced training capacity. It is therefore a notable fact that travel to the metropole for higher degree or post-doctoral work was found in the careers of interviewees in all countries and all domains, across a wide range of disciplines. They included a scholarship to Cornell, an Oxford PhD, a Colorado PhD, a Paris PhD, a Harvard post-doc, and so on. This is an old pattern for Southern tier countries, and has often been deliberate policy. An example is the Brazilian programme ‘Science Without Borders’, a government initiative aimed at raising the numbers of students with an international education. Data collected by the federal agency CAPES (2016) show that between 2011 and 2016 Brazil sent 38,557 undergraduate or graduate students to universities in the US and the United Kingdom; France and Germany were the next most popular destinations. From our data, it seems this established custom was simply applied without question to the new domains, where it continued to confer career benefits. But this may now be changing. In Chapter Four we noted that very recent publication data show almost all the first authors of papers in the three domains who come from Brazil, South Africa and Australia also have PhDs from those countries. It seems likely that we are looking at a gener­ ational effect of some significance. The older and more established researchers, on whom we focussed our interviewing in order to get the oral history of the domains, are now being displaced by a younger generation mainly trained at home. If that is correct, we are seeing a maturing of the research infrastructure in the Southern tier that has large implications for the future. Research travel also goes the other way, with researchers coming to the Southern tier and bringing their agendas with them. Combining this with the pattern of South/North/South return migration already mentioned, we can speak not only of a workforce in the metropole and one in the periphery but also of a North/South linking workforce. This is made up of people who migrate temporarily, travel frequently and collaborate in both regions. Franz for instance (HIV, Brazil), did his degrees locally, connected with a WHO project led by famous British and US researchers and funded from the USA, and began travelling. Narrating his early career he remarked ‘Whenever I had a chance to go to the United 148

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States I always went there’; and in due course travelled also to Germany, Scandinavia, Canada and the Netherlands, while keeping research and action projects going in Brazil. The linking workforce may have been particularly important for South Africa, where many intellectuals were in exile during the apartheid era. But it is found across the Southern tier, and keeps other intellectual workers there in touch with developments in the metropole. In the domains of HIV and climate change, as shown in Chapter Two, the new knowledge became organised through multilateral agencies: WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS, then UNAIDS; and the Inter­ governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988. No such body exists in gender studies, though the growth of this field was stimulated by the UN Decade for Women 1975–85 and the UN World Conferences on Women from 1975 to 1995. In the IPCC and UNAIDS, care has been taken to arrange particip­ ation from the global periphery. Yet metropolitan researchers and their paradigms have priority. This can be seen in the content and authorship of the IPCC’s famous reports on climate change knowledge, analysed by Corbera et al. (2015). This priority was subtly reflected in the intellectual structure of the domains. Climate change and HIV research, as they developed on a world scale, gave a central place to forms of knowledge that could only be sustained on a large scale in the metropole. As shown in Chapter Four, in the HIV domain, biomedical knowledge, including laboratory-based virology and large-scale epidemiology, outweighs other disciplinary forms numerically; and in policymaking is generally given priority over other disciplines—though this priority is contested by some activists and social scientists. In climate science, intellectual priority is given to physics-based computer modelling of the atmosphere. The consequence is made clear by Daniel (climate change, Australia), an experienced modeller himself. Daniel gave a wonderful interview with vivid detail of the labour process in his field. He explained that ‘a climate model is a million lines of computer code’ and technically very demanding: All of our stuff is high-performance computing. So you have got to be able to run Linux or Unix; to do it efficiently you have got to be able to write scripts in an appropriate shell.

Australia is one of the richest parts of the periphery; yet in Daniel’s view there was just one computer system in the whole country advanced enough to handle this work. 149

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What these patterns mean for researchers in the Southern tier is nicely put by Jennifer (HIV, South Africa), who works with donor funding: As soon as you start to publish, you have to speak in some way to the international literature and global debates and questions. South Africa isn’t this lovely exotic place any more; the sort of South African exceptionalism starts to fade. At that point you have to start thinking of yourself in the world as a whole.

Implicitly, the ‘international’ or the ‘global’ is what gets recognised in the metropole. How should we conceptualise the hierarchy that emerges from these discussions of resources, workforce and intellectual structure? We cannot say that the global periphery is marginal for the production of know­ ledge. Big epidemiological studies or clinical trials in the HIV domain need large infected populations and they are mainly in Africa and Asia. The researchers need local clinics and their staff to administer treatments, make tests and record results. The climate models too need massive data inputs from the world beyond the North Atlantic. In the gender domain, the researchers we interviewed have not been involved in large international studies. Nevertheless such studies are becoming more common, such as the IMAGES (International Men and Gender Equality Survey) research (Barker et al. 2011). In all these types of research, the terms of cooperation are laid down by funders and research managers from the metropole. These terms are sometimes challenged by researchers in the Southern tier, seeking a better balance of responsibility and recognition. Like other authors we apply the Gramscian term ‘hegemony’ to this situ­ ation. Hegemony does not mean top-down coercion imposing a single worldview. It is a contested process of structuring practices and discourses, which creates a shared common sense, and must take into account the interests of subaltern groups. The techniques and ideas that became hegemonic do not develop from a single source. There are certainly powerful institutions pushing in these knowledge domains, including government agencies, university systems, the publishing companies discussed in Chapter Five, and inter­ national funding agencies. The traces of these institutional systems are widely visible in our data; they are not always pushing in the same direction. The hegemonic situation within the global economy of knowledge can be defined by three features: the institutional centrality of the elite universities, research centres, journals, publishers and funding agencies of the global North; the global acceptance of a cultural framework for knowledge 150

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production, a framework that emerged from the era of European empires and is now sustained by the pattern of institutional centrality; and the active involvement of the intellectual workforces of the global South, creating potentials for extraversion, contestation and different agendas. We will return to these potentials later in this chapter.

Participating at a Distance Australia, South Africa and Brazil are all geographically remote from the metropole, and workers in a metropole-centred economy of knowledge constantly face the problem of how to participate. They have developed a range of solutions. One involves linking with researchers in the global North. This can be done on an individual basis, for instance as a sequel to academic travel, to study in Northern universities or to attend international conferences. It can also be done by a group or organisation. Various interviewees mention Southern tier research groups signing up to multinational studies funded by the European Union, the National Institutes of Health in the USA, or a big multinational NGO such as the Center for Clean Air Policy—sometimes more than one. This is called ‘partnering’ with Northern institutions. The partnership may be asymmetrical, given where the funding comes from. But it is also possible for Southern researchers to establish collaborations, networks and research units that aggregate local resources and produce a critical mass that is able to negotiate with better-resourced Northern researchers and with funders. We have seen examples of this too. Respondents in the HIV domain describe the growing dominance of a biomedical research paradigm based on large-scale trials, rigidly designed and controlled. Such research is often run by US or UK researchers who access funding from government or big pharmaceutical corporations. But increasingly, especially in South Africa, large locally based and directed research institutions are running these studies themselves, a logical outcome where large infected populations required for such trials are located in southern and central Africa. In the climate change domain, the growth of very large computer models, beyond the technical capacity of any university in the Southern tier, tends to make collaboration asymmetrical. Even the gender studies domain is affected. There is certainly more recognition now of the skills and capacities of researchers in the periphery. The position of researchers in the Southern tier 151

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may also be strengthened by having multiple organisational links. Jennifer (HIV, South Africa) mentions research collaboration with the World Health Organization and with institutes in three different countries in the global North. Daniel (climate change, Australia) works at a centre that is in partnership with another Australian institution, NASA in the United States, and research groups in two French universities. Researchers in the periphery frequently use digital technology to link to databases and virtual libraries in the metropole, and to interact via email and social media. Remote access to bibliographical resources is important to Murilo (HIV, Brazil): I use PubMed a lot. I am also a research associate of Columbia University, they have a hell of a virtual library and I have access to it—it is one of the great advantages of being an associate of Columbia University.

Maria (gender, Brazil) mentions Facebook, and notes that a great deal of the discussion in her field is now on-line. But she is one of our youngest interviewees, and the older generation usually do not attempt research work through social media. They certainly use email all the time. Among Australian intellectual workers, email was almost universal nearly 15 years earlier (Connell and Crawford 2007). The linking practices that stick in our respondents’ memories are travel and journal publication. Erica (gender, Australia), focussed on local problems and networks early in her career, but has tried increasingly to connect with researchers in Europe and North America by personal travel: Much more consciously taking up [visiting scholar] positions, or visiting things overseas, or going to conferences… Despite everything, academic life is still very face-to-face, I think. There is nothing like face-to-face contact, that is how you really find out what is going on, and who you should know about… [but] I think you can overdo it, to the point where you can’t do your own work.

Those who went to the North for advanced training usually have vivid memories of the experience. It could lead to continuing relationships with a Northern patron, friend or research partner, and could mean entry to a network centred in the North. Researchers in the Southern tier may also bring leading researchers from the metropole on visits; Brazil, South Africa and Australia can afford to do this more easily than low-income developing 152

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countries. A number of interviewees mentioned such moments, including memorable occasions when a whole international congress was brought South. More often it is a matter of going to the metropole for conferences, to visit centres or laboratories, or for sabbatical or study leave. When established in the local-expert role described in Chapter Three, a researcher from the Southern tier can be drawn into international circuits and become part of an intense round of conferences, consultations and funding negotiations. Igor (climate change, Brazil) notes of one of his colleagues: ‘He is on all the international commissions and this sort of thing. In other words he has a brutal level of internationalisation’. Publishing in the North is a fundamental way to participate at a distance, and almost all our respondents do it. Since the highest-prestige journals are almost all in English, an extra problem is created for Brazilian researchers. Bernardo (climate change, Brazil) has taught in a graduate programme in climate science that requires students to publish ‘inter­ nationally’ before they can pass. This is good for the reputation of the units concerned, but puts a strain on the students, whose English is imperfect; and makes it difficult for local practitioners to access the research findings. In response, some researchers follow a two-track publishing strategy. But this is likely to be hierarchical, as Murilo (HIV, Brazil) bluntly admits: When the research is totally innovative, we look for an international publication. But when it is the first time in Brazil that something has been done, we put it in a national publication.

This strategy can slide into the pattern of ‘chasing rankings’ described in Chapter Five. Problems arise because it usually depends on extraversion. If the research does not fit current metropolitan frameworks and concerns, the high-prestige journals are unlikely to publish it. Heather (gender, Australia) ran into this problem: We have found it very difficult to get any of our work published in American journals… I have experienced them as not being interested in world-views that are different from their world-view… I really am not an advocate of theories that position women as biologically inferior and therefore vulnerable. So I am taking a much more social perspective, that runs counter to a lot of the mainstream views in America. And others working here have actually had some 153

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER comparable experiences, sending off work that might be theoretically challenging, and getting it knocked back.

Following an autonomous intellectual path, then, has risks for Southern tier workers in a global economy of knowledge. Wesley (HIV, South Africa) faced similar risks in emphasising economic issues about HIV; he did however succeed in getting these views accepted by journal reviewers. The balance is open to contestation.

Tensions in the Global Economy of Knowledge To speak of hegemony is to risk being understood as picturing the global economy of knowledge as a tightly integrated system, reproducing itself indefinitely. Rather, we see the global knowledge system as historically dynamic, imperfectly integrated, and marked by tensions. One important tension is the problem of language. Publication in English is now the highroad to global recognition. Brazilian policymakers have reacted to this problem in a contradictory way. On the one hand they have supported an open-source database for Brazilian journals, the SciELO on-line bibliographical database, mentioned in Chapter Five. This provides free access and has drawn support from the academic community. On the other hand there is a growing pressure for internationalisation, which usually means publishing in English in mainstream journals. In September 2014 SciELO made public its new rules for listings, which state that all its journals must have by January 2016 a fixed percentage of international affil­ iated editors and a fixed quota of articles written in English—though the quotas are specific for each major research area (SciELO 2014). In October 2014, CAPES, the Brazilian agency for supporting graduate programmes, announced that it would launch a programme aimed at promoting the ‘internationalisation’ of the major Brazilian scientific journals by hiring an international publishing company (Bringel 2015). Many are already published in English, such as the Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society, one of the leading Brazilian journals in the Web of Science. Another tension concerns the rhythm of workforce creation. Many of our interviewees were involved in the setting-up phase of their domain, described in Chapter Two. Augusto (climate change, Brazil), already mentioned, recalls the surge of interest in the pioneering moment. He deliberately published some of his work abroad, and organised international conferences, because these were ways to make connections: 154

Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge So that the world which had funds, would see me and fund me. Come to Brazil, look who I brought here, lots of people. I organised so many conferences. It was very good at the time. But I am saying: luck… Everyone worked, obviously. But there was a very important opportunity factor. When I realised, I could not escape! It was a successive thing of repressed demand, understand? Very large.

Augusto recognised the opportunity as well as the underlying need, and caught the wave. Yet research centres and training programmes can be set up, journals established and careers launched, only to find that funding and political support are draining away. This happened traumatically to gender studies in Australia in the 1990s, when a sharp political turn away from gender equity concerns became apparent. Several of our interviewees in the HIV domain, in Brazil and Australia, suggest that the time of maximum policy interest in AIDS has now passed, and research funds are shrinking. The local political and institutional situation in Southern tier countries is important. Relatively autonomous funding agencies, such as the National Research Foundation in South Africa, provide some continuity for researchers. But where governments are determined to change research priorities, they can usually do so. In Australia, under a Right-wing government closely aligned with the export mining sector, climate change research was slashed in the country’s largest research agency, the CSIRO. Intellectual problems also matter. Some of our interviewees suggest that the atmospheric modelling currently at the centre of the climate change domain may be reaching a limit—not so much a computational limit, but a limit to the kind of knowledge that can be included. The current IPCC framework distinguishes science, mitigation, and adaptation. Social science is introduced only in the ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’ sectors. The only social content that can conveniently be included in the models is a quantitative version of economics, which accordingly is the most prominent social science in the current climate change literature. But this narrow selection is questionable. Out-of-control social processes are producing the crisis, and in responding to it, knowledge about social dynamics and institutional change would seem to be vital. There is a great deal of knowledge about these issues—but little of it can be expressed in the restricted forms needed by the mathematical models. In the HIV field too, once the viral character of the epidemic was established—which was known by the mid-1980s—social knowledge for prevent­ ion and care would seem to be central. In both Australia and South Africa 155

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it gained traction. But the recognition of social research on HIV and AIDS has been very uneven in the international domain, to the intense frustration of some of our interviewees. The hegemonic situation is legitimated by a simple model of science as universal in method and validity, which is widespread among our interviewees. The positive side of this belief is that all scientists are equal, subject only to tests of their empirical claims. But this ideal is often undermined in practice. Knowledge produced in the global periphery lacks international recognition unless it enters the dominant economy; and full inclusion in this economy can be difficult. This becomes evident in the key medium for all three domains— refereed journals. In the neoliberal era, as shown in Chapter Five, pres­ tigious Northern journals have been commodified, and knowledge is increasingly held behind pay walls. Two current solutions to this problem involve the author paying the publisher: publishing in new open access journals such as PLOS ONE, and publishing with ‘Gold’ open access in existing journals. This can be done by well-heeled research centres with funding for the purpose, but not by many others. Rafaela (HIV, Brazil) comments angrily on the ‘perverse logic’ of journals demanding payments where no funds exist. Even for researchers at the top of the tree this has become difficult. For more junior researchers it is disastrous: For them, to improve as a researcher depends on publication. The publication depends on a cost, for which there is no funding. I do not know exactly how far we can go in this process.

Other effects of the neoliberal regime are frequently mentioned in the interviews: the commodification of knowledge, the apparatus of competitive ranking, pressure to increase outputs, the frantic pace of conference-going, publication and reputation-seeking at the elite level, and the casualisation of employment at the junior level. It is not easy to see solutions in the current institutional and political framework.

Initiatives in the Southern Tier The sustained effort to create research workforces in Southern tier countries allows, at a certain point, collective choices to be made which are not determined by metropolitan hegemony. Bernardo (climate change, Brazil) suggested that this point had been reached with the development of ‘the new generation of Brazilian scientists’. During the last ten years a 156

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network of considerable strength has emerged. Brazil produced its own national equivalent of the IPCC reports, with 100 researchers contributing. Bernardo points to three research centres that are, in his vivid expression, the ‘locomotives’ of the national research effort, in atmospheric science, adaptation and mitigation respectively (the three standard IPCC divisions). One is reminded of the three national HIV research centres formerly set up in Australia, concerned respectively with virology, epidemiology, and social research. Wesley (HIV, South Africa) makes a similar comment about his country, pointing to three ‘HIV dynasties’ that arose, in Durban, Soweto and Cape Town respectively, ‘groups that early on managed to pos­ ition themselves as capable and then got better grants and became site leaders’. More generally he argues that ‘South Africa is unique’ in its capacity for HIV research, combining academic and clinical capacity. Cindy (HIV, South Africa) agrees, arguing that the local research workforce has now reached international strength: We’re making an incredible contribution to the global knowledge bank here from South Africa. Maybe not on the basic science side… but certainly on the clinical research side we’re unparalleled. So we’re in a very powerful position to move into that whole position and actually call the shots. And I think that what you’re seeing is a crop of investigators now who can quite happily hold up in international meetings and be key players.

The development of national research workforces and graduate programmes has allowed a shift of another kind: towards regional networks. Some of this flowed from Northern aid. Rafael (HIV, Brazil) tells about an inter­ national ‘mega project’ on sexual health, funded by the Ford Foundation, that set up one regional centre in Latin America, one in Africa, one in Asia, and one in the USA. This became a vehicle for linking, and funding, sex­ uality researchers in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Brazil, and the task of comparison led to some new theoretical thinking. Smaller-scale or more informal regional networks were described by other respondents. Once teaching programmes in the new domains were set up, they could become regional hubs. Rowena (gender, Australia), a key figure in setting up an influential women’s studies programme, mentions students coming from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and India: We had about four or five women academics from universities in India who came to us to do their doctorates in feminism. Some were in 157

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER literature and others were more sociological… And they all went back to begin women’s studies programmes in Indian universities.

Cecília (gender, Brazil) points to another aspect of regionalism. Latin American feminist movements have held a famous series of continent-wide encuentros (Sternbach 1992). Cecília observes that it was the social movement that pushed the researchers towards regional connection, overcoming the division between Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America that is strong in the academic world generally. These are initiatives where Southern tier knowledge workers stretch, without abandoning, the episteme of the mainstream knowledge economy. Workforces, teaching programmes and research programmes were created because there was a recognition of social need—in some cases a calamitous situation requiring urgent response. We did not find, in the research workforces where we were interviewing, a desire for epistemological alternatives as discussed in the de-colonial literature. Very few of our respondents mentioned the global South as a concept, and none saw the periphery as the site of a generalised knowledge project. Discontent with the mainstream, and concern with what might be excluded, were more often heard. The most famous attempt in these three countries to articulate an alternative to the mainstream was the episode described in Chapter Two, the fierce dispute in South Africa over the viral explanation of AIDS. Jennifer (HIV, South Africa) saw in this ‘fractured politics, that led to fractured knowledge’. But she also sees problems in the mainstream. She is pungently critical of the North American-driven biomedical dominance of HIV research and policy: I’ve always been struck in the HIV field at how un-South-African, if you like, the research agenda has been. An extent to which South Africa is seen as the place where there is the worst epidemic in the world, and therefore a wonderful place to build empires and to solve the question of HIV… I go to AIDS conferences and… the goal is the Nobel Prize, not to solve HIV in South Africa—that’s how it feels sometimes.

And she wishes for more South/South connections, with India, Brazil and other African countries, to set ‘a scientific agenda that was more open to a social reading of the epidemic’. Violeta (gender, Brazil) is similarly worried about the natural science takeover of caring professions. She came into the research world from one of these professions, which she thinks used to have a philosophical basis: 158

Making and Re-Shaping the Economy of Knowledge And suddenly, in the name of scientificity, in the name of this crazy thing of producing, producing, producing, and it is only science… when it is a technological advance, we have moved away from this [philosophical basis]. It is a battle to return to this, and to dialectically return on another sphere, in another reality. But nowadays I think this return, it has had an echo. Because this really bothers people, it was bothering them a lot.

To see what that dialectical alternative could be, we need to look at the contestations and alternatives emerging in the three domains.

Contestations and Local Knowledges Since the conditions of nature and society in fact differ between Southern tier countries and the metropole, research may be pushed in new directions that give it vibrancy and engagement. For instance, research on carbon exchange in a tropical country needs to deal with the biochemistry of rainforests. New approaches can emerge, even if the broad methodology was developed in the North. Felipe (climate change, Brazil) shares an interest in sea-level changes with climate scientists elsewhere, but is able to develop a distinctive model using data from coastal environments of a kind that are rare in Europe or North America. The local social environment too can impact on researchers’ agendas. Gretta (climate change, South Africa) is one of our respondents who combines research and theory with a strong interest in applied knowledge, and who has hands-on experience in the NGO world. She is critical of the formalism of her research colleagues’ agendas, their preoccupation with setting up information systems, and what she sees as the ‘void’ in adaptation work and the lack of mitigation work in her region: It’s hard for me not to, from my context… because I live in South Africa, and I can see the inequalities and differences. It is so im­port­ ant to address those first… And then we can look at how we integrate climate change into those.

Addressing these issues can produce distinctive agendas for whole research groups or centres, and draw people from local communities into the know­ ledge production process. Such projects remain within the domain of knowledge as understood globally, but represent distinctive foci within it. This allows Southern tier 159

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researchers to dialogue on more even terms with colleagues in the global North. Wesley (HIV, South Africa) tells of a moment when a call for collaboration from a famous institution in the metropole, offering a lot of money, was met with a demand for parity: We insisted that we would only participate—and there were a couple of us in South Africa who agreed—that we would only participate if we were co-PIs [principal investigators] and could host the data centre in South Africa… We wanted the money so that we could hire our own statisticians and staff… [The data centre was established]. It’s part of the global executive committee of these collaborations.

Some of our respondents had been involved in North/South collaborations on the conventional model which turned out badly. A very senior Brazilian researcher recalls collaborating with a US institution: which in practice left me and many other people in Brazil with a bitter feeling… that we were working way too much and we were getting little in return. We also had an experience with the Germans which left me—hell, I will never cooperate with these guys again… I started and immediately felt it was to do the donkey work for the Germans, so I gave up. A colleague of mine remained involved and regretted it afterwards.

It is also possible for a Southern tier researcher, working entirely within the mainstream knowledge formation, to make a serious internal critique of it. The climate domain, for instance, has centred on physics-based atmospheric modelling. Local studies are scaled up and fed into global models, while the models attempt to include more and more factors. The domain has thus mutated from meteorology or atmospheric science to ‘climate science’ to ‘earth systems science’. Daniel (climate change, Australia), a highly respected physical scientist, is concerned about this trend. He thinks that earth systems science is dangerously close to an attempt at a ‘science of everything’, a project that is ‘mindbogglingly difficult’ and currently not really possible. There are, then, frictions and contestations within the mainstream eco­ nomy of knowledge. How these can lead in new directions is shown in the interview with Peter, a very senior researcher in a highly technical field (which we will not identify further, to preserve anonymity). In the early stages of his career he did not question the mainstream knowledge economy. 160

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Several experiences contributed to change this. As an international research advisor, Peter helped set up a research and intervention programme in a very poor country in the region—and was badly burned by local politics, to which the research design had been insensitive. As his local-expert work with communities in his home country deepened, he became more aware of alternative forms of expertise, and the role of communities as producers of knowledge. He became increasingly involved in projects with indigenous communities, where: ‘You might approach with some notion, but you may well leave with a very different notion!’ You could not just walk in with a research design. By the end of the interview, Peter was propounding a multiple-perspective view of knowledge: You can’t just interpret what you are seeing from your own perspective. You have to see how that might look, and the understandings of that knowledge, from a number of different perspectives. And obviously you can’t be those perspectives, but you have to indicate an awareness of those perspectives.

He has made a dramatic change from his starting point; and when he goes back into that professional world, and hears the unreconstructed language: ‘I feel shocked. It is like where I was, twenty-five years ago’. Peter is unusual in his clarity about epistemological change, but not alone. Others speak about knowledge, experience and wisdom that exist outside, or on the margins of, the mainstream economy of knowledge. A considerable number of our research participants, especially in the gender domain, have been in social movements such as union or gay community organising, feminist anti-violence or education work. Some still see themselves as activists. Jennifer (HIV, South Africa), who has a background in political struggle of the apartheid era, says ‘I have always considered myself as a practitioner activist, not as an academic’. She stresses that her starting point is not universal research questions but ‘a set of practical commentaries and engagements’. These forms of activism are not necessarily opposed to mainstream research. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa, like much environmental activism, depended on conventional science. In the early days of the HIV epidemic, before antiretroviral drugs were available, such action was in fact dominant. Activists and gay community agencies pressed for government intervention, legislation, and funding for both biomedical and social research. Jean (HIV, Australia) argues strongly that the 161

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whole AIDS research and prevention enterprise rests on this activism. The social networks are the data, and researchers cannot get their blood samples, clinical triallists or interviewees without them. Peter, Jennifer and Jean are appealing to forms of expertise and know­ ledge that are distinctively local. This is not the same as the local-expert role within the mainstream knowledge formation described in Chapter Three; rather it is a question of another way of knowing. Nancy (gender, South Africa) puts this most eloquently after engaging with a range of theories, from African feminism to capability theory: One of the things (Obiama Nnaemeka) crystallises for me, and that I’ve tried to work towards in some of my work, is the complexity of the social relations of gender, the complexity and the situatedness of them in Africa. And indeed you can bring that lens to anywhere so that at times it’s about negotiation and at times it’s about confrontation.

Nancy concludes that a ‘relational quality of ideas’ links with action and is informed by action. These ideas have ‘political connectiveness’ which is expressed in forms of disciplinary knowledge but which also ‘shakes up’ disciplinary knowledge. The disciplinary framework cannot always accommodate Southern approaches—‘it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t answer our questions’. What Nancy, Peter, Jennifer and Jean have in mind may be called, quite simply, local knowledge. It grows from interaction with local communities and movements, experience of conditions in the local environment, and the know-how involved in dealing with them. Knowledge of this kind appears in all three domains in this study. It may concern local customs and history, local geography and vegetation, or local conditions of poverty; it may also be used, as Nancy does, to engage global questions and modify Northern theory. It may be developed over time by a researcher, or it may be brought to a research project by hiring local people to work in a clinic or to run an action programme. Undramatic as it is, local knowledge is highly valued by those researchers who want to correct the abstractions and preconceptions of the mainstream knowledge formation. How these processes weave together may be seen in the experience of Zubaida (gender, South Africa), who identifies herself as an ‘activist scholar’. She grew up in an inner city segregated community. Under apartheid, she experienced South Africa’s racial discrimination, studying in segregated school and university systems. She read Black Consciousness poetry growing up but was forbidden political participation by her parents. 162

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While at university, Zubaida was an activist in a women’s organisation. Over time she became interested in the strategic directions and internal debates within feminist groups in the anti-apartheid movement. Her early research work was intensely collective, and this was a source of strength for Zubaida. In the context of struggle: ‘the collaboration really gave us intellectual courage… it wasn’t just personal friendships it was also a political academic project’. Running through Zubaida’s research work is her ongoing engagement with community organisations and students who are often also from activist backgrounds. As her career progressed, Zubaida travelled and developed links with partner research institutions in the North. Her work became ‘translational’. She presented ‘quite often to audiences that had a solidarity interest in South Africa but their scholarship was about other places’. Zubaida become engaged in the international feminist debates about political representation and gender quotas, and began expanding her interests to other nations on the African continent. Through academic-practitioner networks linked with international development organisations, Zubaida and her collaborators engaged critically with the embedded rationales behind gender and development programmes. With her local and international colleagues she argued for analysis of ‘gender from the position of justice rather than think about gender from the pos­ ition of better governance or more efficient state spending’. Zubaida does not speak from a ‘Third World’ position, but instead emphasises the inter­ connections between changing gender relations in different societies.

Alternative Allegiances The conventional career path for successful researchers from the Southern tier leads upwards to international recognition and closer integration into the global economy of knowledge. It involves collaborations and grants, publication in top Northern journals, invitations to conferences, even job offers in the metropole. Allegiance to the mainstream knowledge form­ ation is normally undisturbed, though one’s role in it may change, as Nicole (HIV, Australia), explains: I haven’t been physically in the lab for about—for years. But I am very hands-on, meaning I write grants, I write papers, I supervise students, I’m completely all over the data they’re producing. So as you get on in laboratory science, most people don’t stay in the lab… I think in the 163

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER end for a laboratory-based scientist that leads a research group, your role is the ideas, and knowing what’s important and what’s not. And knowing when you’ve invested enough time in something… Finding opportunities, finding collaborators.

For a significant minority of our participants, however, something did happen to challenge their allegiance to the mainstream knowledge form­ ation. For Peter, it was the accumulation of experiences described above. Anton (HIV, South Africa) also registered the different environment he was working in after migrating to South Africa: I’m also interested in social contacts, and how the particular spaces of South Africa—whether it’s rural communities or informal settlements—shape people’s lives and how they interact with [AIDS] interventions.

For those who made such a mental shift, the effect was to assign greater value to what we have called local knowledge. Camille called this a ‘second layer of thinking’, Peter described it in terms of ‘different perspectives’. This language suggests an alternative episteme; but most of our respondents do not go so far. Even with Camille and Peter the idea remains uncrystallised, not a well-formed alternative paradigm so much as a bundle of ideas about differences of place, experience, social needs and research agendas. Yet even in this uncrystallised state, an emphasis on local knowledge can be powerful. It motivates one of our respondents, who is an editor of an influential Northern journal, to use that position to urge change in research agendas to address the health impacts of climate change in the global South. It motivates another, who is active in international forums, to emphasise the urgency of sea-level change for small island states. We have argued that extraverted knowledge practice is active, not passive, and the same is true for concern with local knowledge. Harold (climate change, South Africa) has tried to build an institutional base for new thinking oriented to African perspectives and needs: I felt we couldn’t really start to try and develop international southernAfrican or African relationships until we had a critical mass at [the institution] itself. So the focus has been very much about starting at home, then building relationships in and around [the city] and [the region], and at the national government scale, and then expanding out after that. 164

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Felipe (climate change, Brazil), whose interest in distinctive local environments was mentioned earlier, looks beyond his speciality to the state of science and public policy in Brazil. He criticises the narrowness of contemporary science, and the institutional pressure for productivity; he worries that natural scientists are no longer ‘social thinkers’. Compared with the number who express some form of local knowledge perspective, only a few of our respondents mention the clear-cut alter­ natives that are found in the post-colonial literature described in Chapter One. Two of the gender studies scholars from Australia mention postcolonial theory. One of them, Cath, seems to have learned about this trend via the metropole, when it appeared in the journals she follows. She is now well versed in post-colonial feminism and applies the approach herself. The other, Pat, also became aware of post-colonial perspectives at a later stage of her career, and with her students formed a learning collective focussed on Asian perspectives. International collaborations and international students took her on a ‘massive learning curve’. Indigenous knowledge, as a framework, was mentioned by very few of our respondents and none of them offered a robust endorsement. In the construction of these three domains of knowledge in the Southern tier, indigenous knowledge simply did not appear as a significant alternative episteme. Rather, the knowledge that indigenous people have was subsumed in the looser local knowledge approach. But a related issue does appear more widely in the interviews, the quest­ ion of South/South connections. Bernardo (climate change, Brazil), though still well-connected in the metropole, has given more attention in the last ten years to research connections across South America and with South Africa. Lais (HIV, Brazil) has developed regular links with Mozambique. An African gender studies network was established with its headquarters in South Africa; their journal Feminist Africa launched in 2002. A number of the Australian researchers take an interest in Asia because of aid programmes, the rising numbers of Asian students in Australian universities, and visiting academics from Asia. External funders have sometimes supported a regional approach, in all three of our domains. When Jennifer referred to herself as a ‘practitioner activist’, she was close to another potential episteme. Activist knowledge has its own logic and forms of communication (Maddison and Scalmer 2005). Jennifer sees this mainly as an alternative practice; Jean, as mentioned above, sees social activism as a basis for mainstream knowledge. Violeta (gender, Brazil) takes a long step further: 165

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER If gender studies are revolutionary in themselves, why can the way they are produced not be revolutionary? What can these studies give, other than the product? Can the process not be an intervention?

Here a whole alternative methodology is implied. So Violeta designed her graduate teaching in the form of participatory workshops, using techniques she had learnt in a feminist NGO, ‘very advanced in terms of intervention techniques, including the participation of women’. She became interested in the action research literature, especially the work of the great Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and her students began using those methods. None of these alternative allegiances offers a major challenge to the mainstream knowledge economy in these three domains. Yet we think it significant that several alternatives are present in our evidence, even on a small scale—activist knowledge, post-colonial thought, and South-South connection. And it certainly matters that another, the local knowledge agenda, is present on a substantial scale.

In Conclusion This chapter has explored the making and re-making of the three global domains of knowledge, as seen in the work of researchers across the Southern tier. It has traced the making of a hegemonic situation in these new domains, which does not depart markedly from the historic pattern in the global economy of knowledge. The knowledge institutions of the global North hold a central position in this economy, as shown in the statistics of research output, and more subtly in intellectual patterns. We have shown that a hegemonic situation does not imply passivity, nor uncontested domination. Rather, the common pattern of extraversion in the periphery involves an active response to hegemony: the situation is negot­ iated, and creative ways of participating are devised. Further, extraversion is only one form taken by the agency of intellectual workers in the peri­ phery. Among the actions we have noted are the creation of local research programmes, the founding of research centres, and the linking of research to public policy addressing local problems in distinctive ways. These open other possibilities at the structural level. These three domains reveal considerable collective achievements by the research workforces of the Southern tier, which often started from a slender base. Examining the HIV domain in Brazil, for instance, we note the success of the national initiative in the 1990s, and the role played by both 166

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researchers and activists in promoting free access to drugs and treatment. In a country with a history of poverty and inequality, this is a considerable success. It is not the only collective achievement shown in our study. Other examples are the founding and continuing work of the research centres, the subjects of our organisational ethnographies described in Chapter Three. The de-colonial school introduced in Chapter One speaks of the coloniality of power, of abyssal gaps between coloniser and colonised, and of separate epistemologies. Our research did not find abysses or rival epistemologies. We did find tensions in these domains, including mis-timings between policy crises and workforce formation, difficulties of participation from the peri­ phery, and gaps between knowledge production and social need. We found change and contestation, local knowledges, and complex interweaving of Northern paradigms and Southern tier experiences. The metropole’s share of scientific publications has declined recently, and the Southern tier has partic­ ipated in the changing balance. These are not revolutionary changes, but they show that the structure of the global economy of knowledge is not static. Many of our respondents value connections around the global periphery. Brazilians seek links with researchers across Latin America and in Africa, South Africans connect across their continent, Australians develop links in the Asia-Pacific region. The connections that have already been made show a practical basis for the proposals for connecting knowledge projects that have come from sociologists in the post-colonial literature (Bulbeck 1998; Bhambra 2014). At present there are few economic resources supporting this interest. Neoliberal university managers and governments are unlikely to find it attractive; most remain attached to a competitive knowledge economy centred on the global North. It will have to be intellectual workers themselves, and social movements in the global South, who push for new forms of solidarity. Our findings reveal creative adaptations of the mainstream knowledge economy in response to social need. The dynamics of change include the creation of institutional ‘locomotives’ with distinctive programmes, as well as the moves towards regional networks and agendas. Most important of all, we would argue, is the building of research workforces within the southern tier. This is a strategy consciously pursued in all three domains and all three countries. Together with the ‘linking’ workforces, which are potentially a conduit of Northern influence but also of Southern initiative, these workforces give not just an immediate but also a long-term capacity for knowledge development in new directions. 167

C H A P TE R S E V E N

Southern Tier, Global Economy and Knowledge Workers In Chapter One we introduced the global economy of knowledge and the position of Southern tier researchers within it. Chapter Two explored the new domains of knowledge and the way they came into existence and developed over time. Chapter Three described the intellectual workforce of these domains, their shaping and their institutions. Chapter Four investigated patterns in the circulation of knowledge in the new domains, and Chapter Five discussed the institutions and gatekeepers shaping the circulation of knowledge between the global North and South. This led into Chapter Six, which considered the responses of Southern tier intellectual workers and the changes their work is introducing to the global economy of knowledge. Our research findings as a whole, through the different studies reported in this book, show the profoundly historical and social character of know­ ledge and its making. Popular discussions of knowledge often forget this— sometimes through enthusiasm for technology, sometimes through a belief in a set of abstract, universal rules that govern science. In this project, however, we have been studying sophisticated contemporary domains of know­ ledge involving both high and low technologies, and here the significance of historical context and social processes for the shaping of knowledge is unmistakable. We see this in the trajectories of the three domains, as traced in Chapter Two. In each case, the historical formation of the new domain was a time of uncertainty and excitement, in which researchers, often crossing from other specialities, responded with their professional tools to emerging social need. In the gender domain, researchers responded to knowledge needs defined by social movements and rapid cultural change. In the HIV/AIDS domain, the recognition of a devastating epidemic turned initial, narrowly focussed responses into a broad stream of research linked with social action. In the climate change domain, distinctively, the first moves came from

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researchers—though here too, wider context mattered. An environmental movement already existed when climatologists came to a consensus about anthropogenic change, and policy responses and the broadening of research followed. The historical moment matters, when we consider the particular form that the global character of the knowledge formation takes in these domains. The HIV/AIDS domain has been marked by the rapid inter­ nationalisation of the epidemic, the involvement of international agencies such as WHO, and the large and frequent international conferences that have tied the domain together. The climate domain is practically defined by the work of the IPCC, and relies massively on the internet for the transmission of data and sharing of models. The gender domain, less technologised, has also been influenced by the internationalisation of feminism and the jet aircraft that allow quick global travel for researchers—at least for those with funding. The social dimension is equally clear from the differing trajectories of these domains in the three countries where we have done this research. South African researchers’ extensive involvement in HIV/AIDS research, and the enormous contributions they have made to global publication in this domain, are driven by the unique scale of the epidemic in southern Africa. Brazil’s emergence from military dictatorship in the mid-1980s made a research effort in the gender domain possible, though also gave influence to Northern funders. The careful organisation of Brazilian climate change research, with its IPCC-style reporting and its specific ‘locomotives’, has no analogue in Australia, where climate change research has faced sustained hostility from mining corporations and Right-wing denialists, and has been hampered by government. The contrasting fates of gender studies in Australia and South Africa in the 1990s are also striking, with the political turn against gender equity in the one case, and towards gender equity in the other. Waves of funding for research have followed these shifts of attention, creating differences in the research workforce in the three countries. All three countries, however, have been impacted by the neoliberal turn. The vulnerable, project-based funding of the work in the three research centres we studied is one of the consequences. One of the fundamental reasons for the way knowledge responds to social context is that knowledge is produced by collective labour, a fact particularly visible in new research fields where the initial organising has to be done. In this study we have described characteristic research practices of 169

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Southern tier workers in these domains, and the ways their labour process is organised. We have noted differences in these matters among the three countries. They include the permanent civil servant employment status of Brazilian researchers in public universities who have passed the required public examination, and the influx of short-term international aid money to South Africa in the transition years of the 1990s. We have also noted similar­ ities, including the growth of a precariously employed though highly trained workforce of young researchers in all three countries; and the difficulties caused by the commercialisation of international research journals (discussed in Chapter Five) on the one hand, and the competition strategies of university managers on the other. To borrow language from ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967), the state of knowledge in any domain has to be seen as a practical accomplishment, something brought into being in specific social circumstances by a specific workforce. In the same way, we should see the global economy of know­ ledge as a practical accomplishment. It was brought into being through identifiable historical processes, and is sustained by the labour of a highly differentiated, worldwide workforce today. It is evident that the state of knowledge in each of our domains is not only an on-going, practical accomplishment, but that each domain still reflects the institutional landscape that existed prior to its formation. Though these were new multi-disciplinary fields, with new sets of problems to address, the workforces were nevertheless faced with old rivalries and existing hierarchical structures. As we saw from our data in Chapter Four, one of the more obvious structures is the hierarchical arrangement of the disciplines. When funding for research is provided, greater value seems to be placed on the knowledge that can be produced within the biomedical or physical sciences. While knowledge in each of our domains grew signif­ icantly over the past four decades, the kind of knowledge that dominates has been the kind of knowledge that comes from the biomedical or physical sciences. And as we have argued, the marginalisation of the social sciences, arts and humanities means that there has been a systematic narrowing of perspectives, selection of the problems to be addressed, and the reduction of human and environmental problems—resulting in a narrowed range of solutions on offer. This has significantly reduced the potential of our three domains. Yet the global economy of knowledge is not static. It was formed in the era of European overseas empires, when Brazil, South Africa and Australia 170

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were colonised and the traffic in data between colony and metropole, discussed in Chapter One, grew up. The knowledge economy evolved in the era of de-colonisation: the growth of a global capitalist economy occurring at the same time as the spread of the research university as the key know­ ledge institution. The knowledge economy has continued to change in the last generation. Our research suggests an important reason. We found multiple tensions in the economy of knowledge, outlined in Chapter Six. They include the hierarchy of the disciplines, as we have just mentioned; mis-timings between policy crises and workforce formation; contradictions between an ideology of universality and the actual difficulties of participation from the periphery; as well as stark gaps between knowledge production and social need. Such gaps are particularly evident in the HIV/AIDS domain, where there have been contradictory agendas: on the one hand the pursuit of the Nobel Prize, and on the other, the need for solutions to suffering. Given Northern hegemony, a major task facing the Southern tier workforces in these three domains was to create a presence in Northern forums. The most important strategy was publication in Northern journals, and the results can be seen in the new patterns of journal article ‘output’ and cit­ ation. The research output of Southern tier countries has grown. By 2014– 2015 South Africa, the country with the world’s heaviest burden of HIV infection, came to be placed third globally in publication output in the HIV domain. This is the most prominent collective ‘success’ of the knowledge workforce in any of these domains in our three countries. The efforts of knowledge workers are a significant reason for South Africa now having the largest number of people in the world on anti-viral medication, an enormous achievement given the severe limits on funding. More soberly, we would emphasise that the statistics of research publication and citation are all built on the social processes we have been studying: the complex labour process of knowledge production, the formation of research workforces, and the institutional and financial resources enabling their work. The building of research workforces in the Southern tier is a theme which emerged strongly as our research went forward. This strategy has been pursued by senior researchers and policymakers, almost without argument, in all three domains and all three countries. Building a research workforce is a complex business, with multiple methods: bringing researchers in sideways, across boundaries between fields; sending promising young people for doctoral or post-doctoral training to the global North; setting up new higher degree programmes in Southern tier universities and training specialists 171

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locally; recruiting activists, community members, and professionals into data-gathering and knowledge application roles. The strategy demanded the creation of organisations where the workforce could be housed and the work go forward. In new fields, facing urgent social problems, these have been quite heterogeneous. They include interdisciplinary programmes and new departments in universities; specialised research centres, or units in existing research and policy organisations, funded by governments or foundations—including the centres discussed in Chapter Three; activist or service-providing NGOs which acquire a role in research; networks of clinics and community educators. In all three domains, though universities remained vital, the creation of a new research workforce spilled over the boundaries of the university system. Some activists became researchers and some researchers became activists; some even found themselves in roles in government as well as civil society. Creating and maintaining a highly skilled workforce is expensive, and has faced uncertainties and difficulties. Funding has fluctuated. The advent of the neoliberal policy regime, and the rise of corporate management in universities, has made research funding generally more uncertain and contingent. It has certainly made employment for research workers more precarious, with a predominance of short-term contract work among younger-generation research workers in these domains. With some exceptions in the areas of activist and community involvement, the research workforce in the new domains tends to resemble that in existing research fields, in terms of class, race, indigeneity and gender. This is modified, however, by the numbers of gay men in the HIV/AIDS domain and of women in the gender domain. Both of these patterns reflect the way these domains of knowledge were formed historically, and thus the way the problems were conceived and approached. But the composition of the domains—in terms of class, gender, race or ethnicity—does influence the kind of knowledge produced in the domain, the nature of quest­ ions that will be asked, the approaches to be taken, and the solutions that are sought. Through these mixed strategies, significant Southern tier research workforces were formed in the three domains. Together with the ‘linking’ workforces described earlier, which are potentially a conduit of Southern initiative as well as Northern influence, these workforces and institutions represent a substantial regional capacity for collective knowledge development. They also create a potential for dealing with the global economy of knowledge from a position of strength. 172

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In the lives of Southern tier researchers, the global economy of know­ ledge is a massive fact. The publication and citation data discussed in Chapter Four confirm, for these domains of knowledge, the familiar predominance of the global North. Behind these figures lies the institutional centrality of elite universities and research institutes in the United States and western Europe, and the global division of labour outlined in Chapter One. As we have emphasised, the structure is dynamic; the position of China in particular has shifted. The structure as a whole remains highly unequal. Our research does show something new about responses to this structure. Most generally, among active researchers in the Southern tier, it evokes extraversion, as defined earlier in this book. The global economy offers researchers in the periphery partnerships of various kinds, such as the role of local expert, a role that has both local and international importance. Some Southern tier researchers travelling this route do achieve prominence in the international field. Our interviews allow us to reformulate this useful concept. Extraversion is a pattern of agency, a way of dealing with a collective situation in the global economy of knowledge. This need not be a situation of powerlessness. The economy of knowledge requires a workforce in the periphery, given the worldwide circulation of data, debate and applied science. Extraversion, to make the concept more precise, means structuring the intellectual labour process in the periphery around relationships in which the knowledge institutions of the metropole have predominant authority. This is a hegemonic situation at a global level. Authority may be exercised directly, for instance when Northern funders define the problems for researchers in the South. More generally it involves indirect control, occurring through such practices as researching within an established methodological framework, or forming an intellectual workforce through curricula modelled on those of Northern institutions. It is also realised within the countries of the North, through practices of intraversion, where Northern scholars systematically focus only on the knowledge produced by other Northern knowledge workers. Researching or teaching in an extraverted mode requires active work. It is a serious conceptual mistake to equate global marginality with passivity. Far from it. Our respondents, even in an attitude of extraversion, are busy, creative people who have built institutions, careers and research agendas. The agency of intellectual workers in the Southern tier is shown in the devices they have developed for participating from a distance, including 173

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strategic travel, partnerships, creative use of electronic media, and tactical publication practices. Agency is further shown in the shaping of agendas; insistence on the importance of poverty, inequality and development; the stressing of location and context; and for some, drawing attention to the limitations of universalist theorising. The de-colonial and indigenous knowledge approaches discussed in Chapter One speak of the coloniality of power, abyssal gaps between coloniser and colonised, and rival knowledge systems. Our research did not find abysses, nor clear-cut alternative epistemes, in these new domains of knowledge. We did find coloniality, in the form of institutional centrality, control of international agendas through funding, and corporate control of publishing. We also found more subtle mechanisms of hegemony, such as belief in the universality of science, and the disciplinary hierarchies created within new domains of knowledge. We also found divergent practices around the mainstream economy and its institutions, offering several alternative possibilities for knowledge. The most common is the ‘local knowledge’ focus, found in all three domains. This is epistemologically loose, but strongly tied to local needs and local communities. It sometimes supports and sometimes challenges the mainstream knowledge formation. On a smaller scale, we also find traces of more radical alternatives: activist knowledge, South/South linkages, and post-colonial perspectives. In the relationship of Southern tier researchers to the global economy of knowledge, the broad pattern of practice in these three new domains of knowledge is neither subordination nor separation but a collective negotiat­ion with the power and resources of the global North. The global economy of knowledge needs inputs from the majority world, and there are bases for negotiation at many levels. In this negotiation Southern tier researchers put forward claims, express discontents, change priorities, create resources, and frame new problems. They have the possibility of challenging the Northern-centeredness of Northern researchers and their institutions, thus interrupting the reprod­ uction of global hegemony. They can do this both by participating in global agenda-setting and by creating their own circuits of publication and co­ operation. We have seen examples like SciELO, and the South/South links in HIV/AIDS and climate research. The Southern tier researchers we have interviewed have been adapting the mainstream knowledge economy under the pressure of social need. They have built institutional locomotives with distinctive programmes, and 174

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have put together regional networks. Perhaps most important, they have built research workforces within the Southern tier. Together with the linking workforces, and emerging means of South/South connection such as social media, these give a capacity for collective knowledge development in new directions. This capacity will be needed in the future. The severest impacts of climate change will be felt in developing countries and especially the poorest ones. The heaviest burden of AIDS has been in sub-Saharan Africa, though the fact that the epidemic is still spreading in poor countries is not widely recognised. Gender inequalities and gender violence are major problems in many developing countries. Beyond the three domains examined in our research, we face world-scale problems of economic inequality, violence, authoritarianism and health gaps. There seems a terrible gap between crisis tendencies on this scale, and a global knowledge economy dominated by the most privileged countries, institutions and social groups—an economy increasingly gripped by the corporate pursuit of profit. There is no guarantee that the gap will be closed. Indeed, the commercialisation of knowledge and the tying of universities to a competitive regime of league tables—processes that are abundantly evidenced in our research—are likely to widen the gap between knowledge institutions and social need in the global periphery. Research workforces in the three countries we have studied (and more widely) are vulnerable to the decline of state support for higher education, the predominance of short-term funding for research, and the broad spread of economic insecurity. If the knowledge economy is to be oriented effectively to social needs on a world scale, the other processes we have studied will be important. Among the really hopeful patterns we have encountered are the engagement of many Southern tier intellectual workers with communities and social movements, and their willingness to develop distinctive agendas. What we have called ‘local knowledge’, emerging in the interplay between professional researchers and local communities, is not a radically new thing; it has been there since the creation of these domains of knowledge, especially gender and HIV/AIDS. It is the kind of constructive change that can flourish in many environments, and can have large consequences. There are significant resources in the workforces and institutions that have been created recently, vulnerable as they are. Knowledge alone will not solve contemporary crises. Yet if they are to be solved, knowledge workers and knowledge practices in the global periphery will play a vital role. 175

Appendix The Method for the Study This project investigates the making of organised knowledge as a process that operates on a world scale. We aimed to explore relationships of global centrality and marginality both empirically and conceptually: empirically, through a multi-site and multi-method investigation, testing some of the key ideas emerging from post-colonial social theory; and conceptually, by reconsidering the sociology of knowledge for a post-colonial world with its multiple knowledge systems, and examining the problem of agency within contemporary global structures. We designed the research as three linked, empirical studies within a common framework. The first (Study A) involved occupational life history interviews with researchers across three domains of knowledge (clim­ate change, HIV/AIDS, and gender studies). The second (Study B) entailed a quantitative study of international publication patterns in the three domains, complemented by a qualitative study of the world of academic publishing through interviews with publishers and editors in several countries; and the third (Study C) comprised three linked ethnographies of knowledge-producing organisations in the three participating countries. This was an Australian Research Council funded project (DP 130103487). The grant provided substantial funds for three years (in practice, spread over almost five years), for the salaries of a full-time research associate and part-time interviewers, some teaching relief for one of the investigators, and the costs of travel, accommodation, equipment, trans­ lations and transcriptions. A specific component of the grant enabled the researchers, who were based on three different continents, to meet face-to-face on four occasions, for several days each time, to review progress, examine transcripts and drafts, make budgetary decisions, and generally take the project forward. These meetings were held in Sydney in April 2013, Cape Town in April 2014, Rio de Janeiro in April 2015, and Sydney in April 2016. While much can be accomplished with the aid of the internet (and we used this extensively), we found the direct interaction invaluable. Daily administration and maintenance of an internal project website was in the hands of the research associate, while matters such as ethics clearance and reporting to the granting body were managed by the Sydney-based

Appendix

principal investigators. The partner investigators in South Africa and Brazil were in charge of the relevant country budgets and the appointment of local interviewers, transcribers etc. The study was composed of several parts, A, B and C (we provide more detail on this below). Ethics approval for each part of the project involving interviews or ethnographies was granted separately by the Human Ethics Office at the University of Sydney and the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cape Town. Much of Study B involved bibliographic data and given this was in the public domain, no ethics clearance was needed. The time involved in applying for ethics approval from a large bureaucratic institution such as the University of Sydney should not be under-estimated. Though a valuable exercise in itself—it forces researchers to be absolutely clear about their design, methodology, theoretical perspective, intended analytical tools, aims and objectives—the on-line, medical-model process of application and surveillance now common in universities under the name of ‘ethics’ is, as many researchers have discovered, undeniably tedious, frustrating, and time-consuming. We, like many other researchers, found ourselves re-designing the study to ensure we achieved ethics approval before funds ran out. We complied with the requirements imposed, but this hampered our efforts to produce an innovative project with regard to either approach or method. Across our multi-site, multi-country project, 134 individuals participated in either formal or informal interviews. Study A involved 73 formal interviews (34 in Australia, 21 in Brazil and 18 in South Africa); Study B involved 34 formal interviews (8 in Australia, three in Brazil, three in South Africa, four in Hong Kong, and 16 in the USA); and for Study C, 27 individuals participated in primarily informal interviews (ten in Australia, five in Brazil, and 12 in South Africa).

The Three Countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia were the major research sites as well as the homes of the research team. Each country is a member of a geopolitical grouping we call the ‘Southern tier’ (Connell 2013), positioned within the Southern hemisphere, and remote from the global metropole. Each has been shaped by European sea-borne colonialism, and has a history of violent dispossession, institutionalised racism and economic depend­ ence. None is a poor country. Australia is high in income in global terms, and all three have regional influence. All have indigenous populations with 177

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unacceptable levels of poverty. All countries have attempted modernisation through import-replacement industrialisation in the mid-twentieth century and then shifted towards a neoliberal extractive economy. Despite these common features, countries of the Southern tier are not homogeneous. As Cardoso and Faletto (1979) observed, shared structural dependency does not produce just one socio-political pattern. Brazil was colonised by the Portuguese, and in addition to settler and indigenous populations has a large Afro-American population as a result of the slave trade. South Africa was first colonised by the Dutch, then by the British, and its indigenous people form a large majority today. Australia was colonised by the British, it became richer than the other two, and its settler population today forms the large majority. When we consider their positions in the global economy of knowledge, the commonalities are significant. The three countries share dilemmas about cultural and political independence. In each, the state has invested in creating a knowledge workforce, a substantial university system and some other high-level research institutions. The three countries share much in terms of relations with the global North, for they are all on the margins when it comes to the setting of research agendas, recognition of their contributions to knowledge, and a generally extraverted orientation to know­ ledge production. This situation makes them fruitful sites for exploring relations in the world economy of knowledge (Maia 2011; Collyer 2014a, 2016; Morrell 2016; Morrell and Clowes 2016; Connell et al. 2017a, 2017b, 2017c). Though we recognise national specificity, our argument is centrally concerned with the shared experience of researchers from across the Southern tier.

The Three Domains of Knowledge The examination of knowledge production in a global context would be a major undertaking for any research team. We sought to make this manage­ able by organising our conceptual and empirical work around three case studies of knowledge production. We called these ‘domains’ of knowledge. Because we were concerned with the dynamics of the global economy of knowledge, our focus was on historically new fields, in which patterns of change might be thrown into relief. A key decision therefore was the selection of particular fields. Conventionally, most studies of research fields have organised their work around disciplines (e.g., Becher and Trowler 2001). A main problem with 178

Appendix

this approach is that the contents of disciplines, and the boundaries between them, vary considerably across countries (Collyer 2012). Moreover, discip­ lines are time-sensitive, exhibiting specific historical patterns, and their hierarchical arrangements and boundaries become increasingly resistant to change. For understanding the historical dynamics of knowledge systems, a more productive approach is to study cross-disciplinary domains as they come into existence and grow. Without established, stable hierarchical rel­ ations between scholars and institutions, there is perhaps more likelihood that new entrants will be accepted, and consequently greater likelihood that the possibilities of change in global relationships will be revealed. We selected three domains which have emerged or expanded in recent decades and have each dealt with problems of global importance. All are multidisciplinary, though with different balances of biomedical, natural and social science. For all three, the global South has played a significant role in the history of the field (though not necessarily the same role). The chosen domains are: (1) HIV/AIDS Research. Confronting first a troubling syndrome and soon transforming into a pandemic, this domain of knowledge developed rapidly from 1980. Virology, epidemiology and public health have been central, but the social sciences and humanities have also been involved. A sharp conflict quickly arose, especially in Africa, about the forms of knowledge needed to combat the pandemic, and some of this contestation continues. (2) Climate Change Research. Again dealing with an emerging global crisis, an arcane specialty—meteorology and weather research—expanded from the 1980s to involve ecology, the nature/society interface, and policy studies. Controversy immediately arose over the validity of the science, and (as seen in the UN global conferences), about the geo-political implications of the science. (3) Gender Research. Though there is a long pre-history, an identifiable, international knowledge domain crystallised from the 1980s, gaining this international dimension through social movements and events such as the UN World Conferences on Women. This domain has gone through a rapid evolution of paradigms. It involves controversial relations between the biological and social sciences, and its globalisation is well-documented and actively debated. We describe the history and growth of these domains in Chapter Two, and offer quantitative data about their growth in Chapter Four.

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Study A: The Study of Researchers and the Production of Knowledge In this part of our study, we relied on life history methods combined with documentary analysis to study the research workforce of the three domains in the Southern tier, their knowledge-making practices, and the global pattern of connections in which they are involved. As well as material on the researchers themselves, these methods give us rich oral history information on the formation and recent past of the three domains. We began by building preliminary histories of the formation of the three knowledge networks, relying on existing narratives and histories, both international and national. While doing this we began to compile lists of potential interview participants. We sought researchers and scholars active in one or more of the three domains, especially exper­ ienced researchers who had a role in the creation or maintenance of these domains. The aim was to form a sample spread across the three domains, the disciplines composing the domains, and the three countries. We included some younger researchers and some respondents who worked on the application of knowledge. Our strong emphasis however was on senior researchers, able to reflect on the history of the domain and know­ ledgeable about its boundaries, key actors and institutions. All participants were at least 18 years of age, and most, except Brazilian interviewees— who for the most part were Portuguese speakers—were fully conversant in English. Invitations were sent to participants, primarily by email, beginning with a small number of key researchers. We extended the list with information from published sources (including formal classifications of researchers for grant purposes in South Africa and Brazil, a system that does not exist in Australia), and ‘snowball’ recommendations from other interviewees. Almost all invitations were accepted, many invitees showing real interest in being a part of this project. This interest was reflected in the very high quality of the subsequent interviews. The recruitment process resulted in 73 interviews across the three domains for this part of the study. Our spread across the three countries was not even (34 in Australia, 21 in Brazil and 18 in South Africa), reflecting our differing time commitments and responsibilities. Among our Study A participants, the majority (62 per cent or 45/73) hold tenured positions as full professors (or the Brazilian equivalent). The remainder hold other 180

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academic, research or policy positions in universities, non-government and government research organisations. Only four early-career researchers were interviewed. Among the participants, 55 per cent (or 40/73) are women, though these women are concentrated in the gender domain, for men dominate both our climate change and HIV/AIDS domains (29 per cent (or 6/21) women in our climate change sample, 86 per cent (or 24/28) women in our gender sample, 57 per cent (or 4/7) women in our combined gender and HIV/AIDS sample, and 35 per cent (or 6/17) women in our HIV/ AIDS sample). These figures approximate our findings with regard to the gender composition of the domains as revealed in our quantitative studies of Chapter Four. The majority of our participants are also White, reflecting the pattern in research universities in these countries. The participants display considerable variation in disciplinary background, reflecting the composite character and recent creation of the three domains. The climate change researchers include experts in the biological and atmospheric sciences, physical geography, engineering, maths, public health, law, as well as economics and political science. The gender researchers interviewed are mostly specialists in the social sciences and humanities, though some come from psychology or public health. Interviewees in the HIV domain include clinicians, epidemiologists, virologists, public health and family medicine specialists, social workers, anthropologists, psych­ ologists and sociologists. Well-established life history and oral history methods (Connell 2010; Leavy 2011) were used for the interviews themselves. In semi-structured, audio-recorded interviews, participants were encouraged to narrate their knowledge of the history of the domain, and their involvement in it; with specific questions about the workings of the international domain, its leading centres and figures. We also asked for career narratives, and discussed mentoring, publication practices and strategies, and international travel and links. We asked about specifics of the interviewees’ labour process, their actual research activities—as far as we could follow them! The interviews consciously focused on actual practices in the researchers’ working lives, rather than attitudes or identities. All the authors of this book participated in the interviewing, together with other staff of the project. Interviews normally lasted about one hour, some up to two. These were recorded and transcribed in full, and the 21 interviews conducted in Portuguese were translated into English for this analysis. Some of the interviews provided significant information about the formation of the domains, 181

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and these were integrated with the documentary material to write our historical narratives and the contestations that shaped them (Chapter Two). As these narratives were written, we sent drafts back to the interviewees, to invite their critique and further elaboration. We employed a modified version of life history method to analyse the interview material, a method Connell had previously used to good effect (Connell 2010), and combined this with standard qualitative analysis, primarily thematic analysis (Willis 2006; Silverman 2000). Analysis began with a close reading and indexing of transcripts. Half were developed into individual case studies or case notes, to get a fine-grained sense of career dynamics in the new domains. The rest of the interview transcripts were analysed for common themes and issues, as well as differences. Tentative interpretations of cases and broader patterns were circulated for discussion within the research group, with each commenting on, and modifying, the documents. We developed several conference and journal papers using the same procedures, and these underlie much of our argument in Chapters Three, Five and Six. In writing journal and conference papers, and indeed this book itself, we made use of pseudonyms, and have omitted various identifying details. Anonymity is important because most participants are well known in their fields, and we wanted them to feel free to be critical of other members of the domain, of their institutions, their governments or professional assoc­ iations where necessary. We have not provided the names of their instit­ utions for the same reason. Readers may find examples of the following labels throughout our work: [Gretta, climate change, SA], which refers to the participant with the pseudonym Gretta, a researcher who works in the domain of climate change in South Africa; [Franz, HIV, Brazil], which refers to Franz who works in the field of HIV/AIDS in Brazil; and [Rowena, gender, Australia], which refers to our participant Rowena, who works in the domain of gender studies in Australia. Some of the participants, such as Cecília and Franz, both from Brazil, are also editors of academic journals. Consequently, their interviews were a good source of information for both Studies A and B3.

Study B: The Study of the Circulation of Knowledge Study B aimed to reveal the production of structure in the global economy of knowledge, which we argue to be an objective facet of social life, 182

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composed of specific forms of social relations but extending beyond this to have a structuring effect on those social relations. Study B has three parts, B1, B2 and B3. Study B was led by Fran Collyer, and research assistance with the quantitative components was expertly provided, during different years of the project’s history, by Tristan Enright, Luke Mansillo, Caroline Yarnell, Liana Mercedes Torres, and in Brazil, Gabriela Mayall.

Study B1

This is a quantitative study using bibliographic data drawn from the Web of Science (WoS), the database described in detail in Chapter Four. Essentially, because the WoS database selects its content primarily from journals with known impact factors, and from the journal collections of the major publishing houses (which do not necessarily have high impact factors, but are owned by these houses), the resulting data offers us a Northern view of scholarly knowledge production. That is, it seriously under-represents the efforts toward knowledge production in the countries of the global South. This must be kept in mind when viewing the graphs and figures in this data base and others of similar design. For our purposes, the WoS offers a map of the measurable and objective differences in publication output between scholars based in the metropole and those of the periphery—as viewed by those in the global North. Our first step was to generate global data sets for each of these domains using the search engines provided within the WoS. We focused on the Web of Science Core Collection, and selected the domains using the advanced topic (TS=) search, restricting the contents of each data base by using the following search terms: Climate Change Domain: Topic: TS=climat* chang* OR TS=global warming* Languages: All Document types: Articles and Reviews Years: 1980–2015 Indexes: SCI-E, SSCI, and A&HCI Note: 1980 was selected as the first year for our study because prior to this, very few or no publications appear in the index for our three domains. 183

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HIV/AIDS Domain: Topic: TS=“HIV” OR TS=“HIV/AIDS” OR TS=“human immunodeficiency virus” OR TS=“acquired immunodeficiency syndrome” Languages: All Document types: Articles and Reviews Years: 1980–2015 Indexes: SCI-E, SSCI, and A&HCl Note: “Quotation marks” were used for the HIV/AIDS domain search to avoid the inclusion of records where the word ‘aids’ (as in ‘teaching aids’) appears in the abstract. Gender and Sex Domain: Topic: TS=gender Languages: All Document types: Articles and Reviews Years: 1980–2015 Indexes: SCI-E, SSCI and A& HCl Once the global data sets for each domain were produced, the data was reconstituted on the basis of publications by year, giving us a broad overview of the development (i.e. growth) of each domain at the global level in terms of cumulative research output (i.e. publications) between 1980 and 2015. The data was also examined according to three other variables, namely publications by country, research organisation, and journal title. The data in the WoS is particularly poor for some search terms. ‘Institution’, ‘field of research’ and ‘funding agency’ are some of the least reliable search terms. For these, the WoS relies on the descriptions provided by the author, rather than a pre-determined check list. For example, ‘funding agency’ will produce separate listings and statistics for the Chinese Academy of Science, The Chinese Academy of Science, CAS, the CAS, the academy of science in China etc. Likewise, the US National Science Foundation is also referred to as the NSF, the US National Science Foundation, the American NSF etc., with separate entries for each. If more 184

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accurate data is required, each manuscript needs to be viewed individually. A mammoth task! Although our study sought to investigate gender studies as a knowledge domain, as discussed in Chapter Four, WoS analytical tools cannot disting­ uish between papers examining gender as a relational concept, and papers employing the term gender merely as a category. In the latter case, papers use the word gender in a binary fashion, often merely as a variable, to indic­ ate whether the subjects belong to a male or female group. The indexed papers may even focus on non-human flora and fauna, or cellular level research. Unlike the climate change and HIV/AIDS domains, the statistical growth of the gender studies domain in the WoS is subsumed within what is a much larger domain: a domain of gender and sex research—and this is how we have labelled most of our figures and graphs for the domain in this book. The same issue arises in Portuguese. We used the equivalent term for gender, gênero, in the Portuguese language, and it too has a meaning which conflates social (relational) gender with (categorical) biological gender, for it applies to both men and women as well as plants and animals. Hence, although Study A is clearly a study of gender research, the categories of gender and sex have necessarily been collapsed for Studies B1 and B2.

Study B2: Context-Content Analysis

This study is also a quantitative study using bibliographic data drawn from the Web of Science, but in this case we have designed a small study to provide us with information that cannot be gleaned from the WoS alone. One of the most obvious pieces of data missing from the WoS index is inform­ ation about the gender of each author. We have been keen to find out the gender of our researchers in each of our domains, and whether this might differ between countries. Other information of relevance includes the funding agencies behind the studies being reported, and the institutions the scholars are from. We therefore designed a small study to investigate these elements of the global knowledge system using the method of context-content analysis (Collyer 2013). This involved drawing a sample of manuscripts from the WoS, and then manually searching the manuscripts for information about the first author’s institution and country, using the internet to find their gender and other relevant information, and putting this information into SPSS for further analysis. Given that this was a time-consuming task, we investigated only a small sample from each of the three domains and three countries (aiming for 500 papers randomly selected from each). This 185

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provided us with indicative information about the three domains and their possible differences across the Southern tier.

Study B3: Editors, Publishers and Research Managers

This study differs from the other parts of Study B, in that it is a qualit­ ative study involving 34 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a sample primarily composed of journal editors, academic publishers of books and journals, and university research managers. A small number of academics who are not editors or publishers were included in the sample to provide information about publishing from an academic’s perspective. The aim of this part of the study is to help us explain the data collected in Studies B1 and B2, and give context to our study of knowledge production. Knowledge cannot be effectively distributed without some form of publication, and given that the system of academic publication has developed over a long period and established a unique set of rules and conventions—quite different to trade publishing—it is critical to examine this aspect of knowledge production. It is particularly important given the dramatic changes that have occurred in academic publishing over the past two decades. (We have explored these changes in Chapter Five of this book). We employed a purposive sampling technique to assemble a set of participants who could provide us with information about the publishing world. The sample was assembled using the internet. To locate relevant publishers, we focused on publishing outfits which were important to our three domains, and had subsidiary offices or headquarters in one or more of the three countries of the larger project. To locate relevant editors, we examined key journals and their editorial boards. Interviews with publishers and editors in the United States and Hong Kong were added to participants from our three Southern tier countries in order to extend the datagathering about publication circuits into the global North and the rapidly developing Asian context. In all countries, both small and large commercial outfits as well as university publishing houses were targeted. As with Study A, ethics approval was sought and provided by the University of Sydney, and pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of participants. All interviews were conducted in English, and the majority by Fran Collyer. Robert Morrell conducted the three South African interviews. All were recorded and transcribed. Using a key informant methodology, we interviewed participants for background information about how academic publishing might differ from trade or other forms of publishing; about changing publication practices; 186

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the challenges faced by small publishers in a market clearly dominated by a few global giants; the challenges of publishing or editing journals in countries of the global South; differences in the opportunities and obstacles between various types of presses, such as university-owned presses versus for-profit commercial presses; and the implications of the current market structure and higher education policies for the production of academic and other forms of organised knowledge. Analysis of the interview mat­ erial relied on the techniques of thematic analysis, with coding conducted manually (and assisted by a word-processor), and immersion a key feature of the process (Willis 2006). Feedback from key participants was sought to ensure the accuracy of our understanding of the publishing market, and this was organised through the exchange of draft manuscripts and a seminar presentation. Participants were located in various countries: three were from South Africa, three from Brazil, four from Hong Kong, eight from Australia, and 16 from the USA. Participants were also from differing areas of the publishing industry, with eight based in university presses, four in for-profit publishing companies, one in a research office, and 17 university-based, book and journal editors. With regards gender, 17 of the 34 participants (50 per cent) were women. In this book and the journal papers drawing from this data, pseudo­ nyms are used to provide anonymity for participants. For many of the participants, the form of description used for Study A is not appropriate, and hence we use alternative labels that tell us whether the participants are an editor or publisher, about the kind of press they work for (or own), and the country they work within. Some of the labels used for participants have been: [William, journal editor and academic, USA]; [Tom, small independent publisher, Australia]; or [Gabrielle, manager, university press, Australia].

Study C: The Study of Research Centres Study C entailed an ethnographic approach to the study of knowledgeproducing institutions, revealing a rich and detailed account of how instit­ utions work in the three countries. We sought to include some of the organisational micro-processes that are foundational to the knowledge system, many of which have been recognised in modern science and technology studies (Knorr Cetina 1999). We approached the field by drawing 187

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on an established tradition of ethnographic research in workplaces, including laboratories and government departments (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Alvesson 2004; Connell 2006b, 2010). We combined this with a relatively recent development—the idea of ‘global ethnography’ (Burawoy et al. 2000; Epstein et al. 2013), involving parallel organisational studies undertaken in different regions. In much of this tradition, organisational ethnography is a very intensive method. Our project’s funding limits, plus the needs of the participating organisations (all of which were under heavy time pressures), limited the amount of time we could spend on each site. Our study therefore followed the pattern of short-form ethnography, also familiar in organisational research (Connell 2006b, 2010). We had resources enough to study one research centre in each of the participating countries. An immediate question was whether to choose all three within one knowledge domain, making inter-country comparison easier, or, in the interest of the larger project, to include all three domains. We decided for the latter, so Study C has one research site in each domain. Although the organisations gave permission for their identities to be revealed, our preference is to give these sites pseudonyms to ensure anonymity: •

In South Africa, we studied the ‘Climate Centre’, a research organisation focusing on environmental research including climate change.

•

In Brazil, our selection was a small laboratory we called the ‘AIDS Centre’, the focus of which is the study and monitoring of HIV/AIDS.

•

In Australia, we investigated an organisation we named the ‘Gender Unit’, due to its focus on women’s health and health policy. The Gender Unit takes a social, rather than epidemiological view of health and illness.

Permission to undertake the research was negotiated with each of the centres. These negotiations were time-consuming, and in Australia, very time-consuming. Two organisations in that country originally indic­ ated interest, but subsequently either declined to participate or could not complete the study. Permission for the fieldwork from the University of Sydney’s Human Research Ethics Office was (eventually) granted after initial rejection and considerable re-negotiation. At the end of the research, the organisational case studies developed in Study C were taken back to 188

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the organisations, to thank participants and provide them with feedback. Participants were offered opportunities to comment on, or correct our understanding of their organisations. In the chosen sites, a programme of documentary analysis, interviews, and ethnographic observation (Emerson et al 2001) was undertaken. Formal interviews were undertaken in two of the sites, with some transcripts produced, but only informal conversations in a third, with observ­ ation as the main focus and a series of field notes. Across the three sites, 27 individuals participated in informal conversations or formal interviews (ten in Australia, 12 in South Africa, and five in Brazil), with the number of participants varying with the size of the organisation. In Australia, the ten interviews were conducted by Rebecca Pearse with the assistance of Raewyn Connell, while the observation was undertaken by Pearse. In Brazil, the ethnography was carried out by research assistant José Renato Carvalho Baptista. Baptista also conducted four semi-structured interviews with the core group, while João Maia conducted one. In South Africa, interviews and observations were undertaken by Ralph Borland. Ten of the interviews were with staff and two with visiting scholars, over the year mid-2013 to mid-2014. A second round of interviews was conducted with each of the interviewees. In addition, Borland participated in several of the unit’s research events, turning part of the fieldwork into participant observation, and together with Vanessa Watson, interviewed the director of the unit. This work has subsequently been published (Borland et al. 2018). The content of the interviews included professional histories parallel to those of Study A, but also extensive material on projects undertaken, funding issues, dissemination practices, and the working of the organisation. Observation on the site gave information about the material circumstances of work, the chains of activity linking researchers within the organisation and beyond, divisions of labour, and other aspects of the everyday life of the worksite. The documentary material, both printed and on-line, gave rich information about the research centres’ public presence, outreach strategies, position in the research world and also in the world of applied knowledge (e.g. policy and public education). The focus of all three ethnographies was the everyday work practices of the researchers, with the aim of producing an holistic picture of the organisational work culture. A specific interest was linkages with other organisations, both suppliers and consumers of knowledge, at national and international levels. As with Study A, the emphasis of our fieldwork 189

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was the actual practices of research, funding, discussion, publication, and application of knowledge, rather than attitudes or opinions. In contrast to Study A however, the unit of analysis for Study C was the organisation rather than the individuals working within it.

Writing and Outreach The project’s fieldwork and database studies were accompanied, like most complex research projects, by a steady process of discussion and writing. The four whole-of-team meetings mentioned above were vital not only for the management of the project but for the development of interpretations and the formulation of writing plans. These meetings were supplemented by frequent email discussions among the principal investigators and the fulltime research associate. The role of research associate was based in Sydney, and was undertaken, in different years of the project’s history, by Nour Dados, Patrick Brownlee and Rebecca Pearse, to whom the authors of this book are deeply grateful. This process of interactive, face-to-face and email discussions lay behind the preparation of internal reports on the information being gathered. From early in the project, reports on the history of the three domains of know­ ledge in each of the three countries began to be prepared. As Study A life history interviews were completed and transcribed, analyses in the form of case studies, case notes and thematic discussions were prepared. As work on the Study B quantitative data proceeded, interim reports were prepared and discussed. When the Study C fieldwork was done, a detailed internal report on each site was written. These documents, circulated for comment among the research team but not beyond, were available as background material when papers for publication were being prepared, and also underlie chapters of this book. This rather laborious process was intended to keep the whole project team informed on each section of the project, and to benefit from sustained discussion of the material and interim interpretations. It also ensured that, when findings were being written up for publication as journal articles or book chapters, the selection of arguments and examples—a selectivity that inevitably happens at the stage of publication—would be guided by more comprehensive background analyses. The project team developed an overall plan for publication and the circulation of findings through its organised meetings. This involved several steps: 190

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1. Presentation of seminar and conference papers. For example: Maia, J. et al. ‘Doing Science in the South: Negotiating Centrality and Marginality in the Process of Knowledge Production on a Global Scale’, paper presented in a panel ‘Global Science and International Collaboration: A Gender Perspective from the South’, International Sociological Association World Forum of Sociology, Vienna, 12 July 2016. 2. Preparation of a series of articles for refereed journals: some on the project as a whole, and others on specific bodies of data or issues. For example: Fran M. Collyer, ‘Global Patterns in the Publishing of Academic Knowledge: Global North, global South’ Current Sociology, published online 24 November 2016, DOI: 10.1177/0011392116680020; Connell et al. (2017a) published in the British Journal of Sociology; Connell et al. (2017b) published in The Sociological Review; and Connell et al. (2017c) published in International Sociology; and Hodes and Morrell (2018) in African Journal of AIDS Research. 3. Planning and drafting of this book. 4. Symposia timed to coincide with the general meetings of the project team. The last of these was effectively a mini-conference, involving about 80 people from all regions of Australia. Held on 14th April 2016 at the University of Sydney, it was titled ‘Epistemologies of the South: Mapping New Directions in Australian Social Sciences’ and involved both plenaries and small group discussions. As in all team-based research projects, publication plans required decis­ ions about authorship. The general principle agreed in this project was that those members of the team who substantially worked on producing the text of a particular article would appear as its authors, with the others acknow­ ledged as team members. For a specific group of publications, which drew on all participating countries and represented the project’s arrival in the international literature, the four chief and partner investigators were treated as a collective author. The agenda of writing and outreach continues as this book is being written, and will continue after it. Though only specific publications are officially treated as ‘outputs’ from a given research project, in fact the 191

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process of circulating research findings and ideas is more continuous and takes a variety of forms. This study is already influencing our teaching, our advising, our policy work, and our public presentations on related issues. We consider these wider and often more informal means of circulation to be genuinely valuable, and we urge other researchers to value them also.

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Acknowledgments Intellectual work is a collective process and a complex research project like this one is built from many contributions. First of all, from our interviewees, on whose knowledge the project rests, and the directors and staff of the institutions who agreed to take part in the study. Rebecca Pearse, Patrick Brownlee and Nour Dados were Senior Research Associates on the project, contributing in project administration, fieldwork, analysis, writing, and ideas. Vanessa Watson participated as a colleague and is co-author of a paper from the project. Research staff on the project, responsible for interviewing and ethnography, were Ralph Borland, José Renato C. Baptista, Jorge Chaloub, Cláudio Araújo and Graziela Mota. Nceba Lolwane provided administrative support. Tristan Enright and Luke Mansillo assisted with statistical analysis and the preparation of graphs. Eoin O’Neil and Sean McIntyre undertook translation. A range of other staff at the University of Sydney, the University of Cape Town, and the Fundação Getulio Vargas provided essential services and support. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council, grant DP130103487. We are pleased to acknowledge the ARC as an institution that still funds research in the public interest. We acknowledge further support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the University of Cape Town. We are grateful for collegial, emotional and intellectual support from Gabriela Mayall; from Andrew Bank, Karen Barnes, Ralph Borland, Keith Breckenridge, Mignonne Breier, Catherine Burns, Ben Carton, Lindsay Clowes, Brenda Cooper, Laura Czerniewicz, Debbie Epstein, Carin Favis, Lesley Green, Rebecca Hodes, David Johnson, Lebo Moletsane, Penny Morrell, Francis Nyamnjoh, Alan Rycroft, Geoff Schreiner, Elaine Unterhalter and Vanessa Watson. The authors express our thanks to all of these people and institutions, who made the project possible.

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203

Name Index Abbott, Tony, 45 Achmat, Zackie, 40 Acselrad, Henri, 47, 49 Agarwal, Bina, 16 Alatas, Farid, 14, 80 Althusser, Louis, 5 Altman, Dennis, 25 Amin, Samir, 16 Ashenden, Dean, 26 Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi, 13 Banks, Joseph, 8 Baptista, José Renato Carvalho, 189 Barker, Gary, 30, 150 Barrett, Michèle, 82 Becker, Bertha, 49 Bhabha, Homi, 26 Bhambra, Gurminder, 167 Blewett, Neal, 34 Boal, Augusto, 84 Borland, Ralph, 189 Brownlee, Patrick, 190 Burnham, J., 3 Butler, Judith, 28, 82 Cabral, Mauro, 29 Canguilhem, Georges, 70 Cardoso, F.H., 178 Carneiro, Sueli, 29 Carson, Rachel, 93, 97 Collyer, Fran, 11, 66, 78, 111, 121–4, 129, 178–9, 183, 185–6 Connell, Raewyn, 7, 15, 19, 26, 66, 72, 84, 123, 152, 177–8, 181–2, 188–9 Cook, James, 8–9 Coombe, Carol, 42 Corbera, E., 149 Crothers, Charles, 42 Dados, Nour, 190 Darwin, Charles, 6, 9 de Beauvoir, Simone, 28 Delius, Peter, 42 Delphy, Christine, 28 Dowsett, Gary, 26 Ehrlich, Paul, 93 Einstein, Albert, 20 Enright, Tristan, 183 Epstein, Debbie, 15, 42, 188, 193 Erne, R., 126 Eyerman, R., 4

Faletto, E., 178 Fals Borda, Orlando, 166 Fleck, Ludwik, 110 Florida, R., 4 Foucault, Michel, 2, 70 Fraser, Malcolm, 45 Freire, Paulo, 71 Freud, Sigmund, 78 Friedman, Milton, 19 Furtado, Celso, 16–17 González, Lélia, 29 Gouldner, Alvin, 4, 7 Greer, Germaine, 25 Hansen, James, 43 Harding, Sandra, 3 Hawke, Bob, 34 Hayek, Friedrich, 19 Hountondji, Paulin, 10, 14, 16–17, 52, 81 Humboldt, Alexander von, 9 Johnson, Lyndon, 93 Jones, Phil, 43 Keeling, Charles, 43 Keim, Wiebke, 16 Kessler, Sandra, 26 Khaldun, Ibn, 14 Kuhn, Thomas, 110 Latour, Bruno, 2, 188 Lavinas, Lena, 28–9 Lukács, Gyorgy, 1–2, 49 Maia, João Macelo Ehlert, 14, 178, 189, 191 Mannheim, Karl, 1–2, 4 Mansillo, Luke, 183 Marginson, S., 124 Maxeke, Charlotte, 30 Mayall, Gabriella, 183 Mbeki, Thabo, 40–1 Meekosha, Helen, 15 Merton, Robert, 2, 15 Merton, Robert, 3 Mészáros, István, 49 Mitchell, Juliet, 82 Moletsane, Relebohile, 33, 42, 193 Montoro, Franco, 37 Morrell, Robert, 15, 31, 42, 178, 186, 191 Myers, PZ, 71

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

Nandy, Ashis, 16 Parker, Richard, 37–8 Patel, Sujata, 13–14 Pearse, Rebecca, 189–90 Picq, Françoise, 28 Piketty, Thomas, 137 Pinochet, Augusto, 19 Polanco, Xavier, 9 Prebisch, Raúl, 17 Quijano, Aníbal, 15 Reagan, Ronald, 19 Reid, A., 4 Revelle, Roger, 43 Rifkin, J., 3 Rowbotham, Shiela, 82 Saffioti, Heleieth, 16, 27 Sawyer, John, 93 Scarborough, H., 4 Scott, Joan, 28 Seuss, Hans, 43 Shapin, Steven, 2 Shariati, Ali, 16 Smith, Dorothy, 3 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 13 Spivak, Gayatri, 26 Tancred-Sheriff, P., 4 Thatcher, Margaret, 19, 72 Torres, Liana Mercedes, 183 Unterhalter, Elaine, 42, 193 van der Wende, M., 124 Volker, Paul, 19 Walker, Liz, 42 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 9 Watson, Vanessa, 189 Wigley, Tom, 43 Winkler, Harald, 52 Woolgar, Steve, 2, 188 Yarnell, Caroline, 183 Znaniecki, F., 4

206

Subject Index Abbott (pharmaceuticals), 117 Aboriginal health, 78 ‘academic capitalism,’ 123 academic texts, 79, 137 academics Asian, 165 Northern, 74 in periphery, 10 pressures on, 126–8, 130, 132–4 publishing industry and, 123, 133 qualifications, 55 role in journal production, 121 Southern tier, 78, 131 translation assistance, 140 women’s studies, 157–8 work practices, 66, 122 acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), 94 activism within climate change domain, 43, 98–9 within gender domain, 75, 77, 93, 161–2, 166 within HIV/AIDS domain, 35–8, 40, 99, 101, 161–2 Southern tier, 52, 165–6, 172 adaptation, 50–2, 69, 75–6, 85, 155, 157, 159 Africa Development, 143 African Journal of AIDS Research (AJAR), 42, 71 African National Congress (ANC), 31 African Sociological Review, 143 African Studies, 42 agency female, 33 researcher, 82–3, 146, 166, 173–4 Agenda, 32–3, 42 AIDS, 94 AIDS, 34, 71, 78 AIDS Action (US), 94 AIDS Action Committee (Aust.), 94 AIDS and Behavior, 34 AIDS Care, 34, 71 ‘AIDS Centre’ (Brazil), 58–60, 63–5, 83, 188 AIDS Council of NSW (ACON), 94 AIDS Councils (Australia), 34 Alternative Discourses in Asian Social Science (Alatas), 14 Amazon Boundary Layer Experiment (ABLE), 148 American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 117

American Association of University Presses (AAUP), 136–7 American Gastroenterology Association, 117 American Journal of Cardiology, 109–10 American Science Foundation, 111 Andrew Mellon Foundation, 117 anonymity, 58, 160, 182, 187–8 anthropology, 25, 49, 80 antiretroviral therapy, 39, 41 apartheid, 7, 30–1, 33, 73, 149, 161–2 anti-apartheid movement, 31, 40, 163 post, 50 applied knowledge, 66, 159, 189 Arena, 7 ‘articuladores,’ 58 Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI), 183–4 Asia antiretroviral therapy trials, 41 Asian perspectives, 165 as data source, 150 imports of American texts, 137 links with Australia, 167 regional networks, 157 SE Asian students in Australia, 41, 165 Astellas Pharma, 117 AusAID, 60 Australian Centre for HIV and Hepatitis Virology Research, 35 Australian Climate Commission, 45–6 Australian Department of the Environment, 116 Australian Feminist Studies, 25 Australian Research Council (ARC), 60–1, 97, 116, 135, 176 Beagle [ship], 9 Beall’s List, 135 Bell Laboratories, 6 bibliometric analysis, 75, 124–7, 132 big-country-centric, 78 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 117 biodiversity, 46, 73 biology, 9–10, 38, 96 biomedicine, 91–2, 96, 99–100 Bird Flu, 97 Black Feminist Thought (Hill Collins), 29 BMC Public Health, 108–10 Bobby Goldsmith Foundation (Aust.), 95 book fairs, 144 botany, 8–9, 96 Botany Bay, 8

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

Brazilian Ministry for Health, 117 Brazilian Movement for Democracy (MDB), 37 Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), 27 British Anti-Apartheid Movement, 40 British Journal of Sociology, 129, 191 Cambridge University, 124 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 138 capitalism, 7, 18, 25, 121, 126 carbon dioxide, 43, 93 carbon sequestration, 68 careers ‘Gender Unit,’ 61 as local experts, 85 narratives, 181 need for international publication, 128, 131, 133, 163 Northern post graduate studies, 148 paths, 10, 82–3, 163 in the periphery, 11 women, 61 Carlos Chagas Foundation, 27 Carnegie, 17 casualisation, 156 Center for Clean Air Policy, 151 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 33, 94, 117 centrality institutional, 150–1, 173–4 marginality and, 11, 15, 176 metropole, 146 Centre for Atmospheric Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR)(Aust.), 97 Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), 41 centre-periphery, 72 Centro CLIMA (Brazil), 47 Centro da Mulher Brasileira (Centre of Brazilian Women), 28 CEPAL strategy, 17 CERES, 18 chemistry, 69–70, 96 China see also Hong Kong climate change domain, 43, 102 development strategies, 17, 20 publications in WoS, 101–4, 119 publishing in, 128, 131 Shandong University, 117 Chinese Academy of Science, 88, 97, 184 Chinese Science Citation Database, 88 citation analysis, 111, 124–6, 129–30, 132, 146, 171, 173 count, 67, 126, 130 indices, 125

civil rights, 132 civil society, 7, 40, 47, 172 Clarivate Analytics, 87 class middle, 4, 24, 30, 39, 50, 118, 131 working, 19, 27, 131 Climate and Development Knowledge Network, 143 ‘Climate Centre’ (S. Africa), 56–8, 62–5, 188 climate change knowledge domain Australia, 43–6, 112, 169 Brazil, 47–9, 156–7, 169 computational complexity, 149, 151 conferences, 93 disciplines within, 44, 95–9, 149 funding, 115–16, 155 gender of authors, 112 Germany, 43, 101–2 highest ranked journals, 107–10 history, 23, 42–3, 93–4, 169, 179 indexes, 183 modelling, 43–4, 67–9, 75, 81–2, 160 national contributions, 101–6 non-government funding, 148 political aspects, 98–9 publications, 88–9, 91 South Africa, 49–52, 56–8, 112 Climate Council (Aust.), 45 clinical trials, 150 CO2, 73 collaborations between institutions, 30, 118 international, 55, 71–2, 74, 118, 151, 160, 165 international, climate domain, 48 international, gender domain, 32 international, HIV/AIDS domain, 38, 41, 59, 74, 79–80, 152, 160 paraticipant/researcher, 36 Colloquium on Men and Masculinities (S. Africa,1997), 32 colonialism, 14–15 colonisation, 174 colonised societies, 8–9, 12, 15–16 Columbia University, 64, 97, 152 commercialisation, 121 commodification of knowledge, 20, 126, 128–30, 156 publishing industry, 121, 127–40 Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) (Aust.), 97, 116, 155 communication, 14, 44, 74, 132, 147, 165 community organisations, 163 conferences Australian, 26 environment/climate, 23, 43, 47, 49, 93, 96, 179

208

Subject Index

gender studies, 27, 32, 93, 149, 179 HIV/AIDS, 37, 74, 95, 158, 169 papers and proceedings, 87–8, 135 pressure to attend, 156 university presses, 136 value to career, 10, 36–7, 71, 80, 83, 93, 95, 151–5 ‘connected sociologies,’ 14 contestation, 52, 86, 151, 159–60, 167, 182 context-content analysis, 111, 185 Coordination for Improvement of Higher Education (CAPES) (Brazil), 18, 117, 148, 154 COPPE, 47 copyright, 122, 125, 142 Cornell University, 148 corporate research, 6–7 Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)(S. Africa), 50 Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), 143 craftwork, 80 creative class, the, 4 CRIOLA (NGO Brazil), 29 critical whiteness studies, 3 CSL Biotherapies, 117 data visualisation, 96 de-colonial movement, 13, 167, 174 de-colonisation, 16–18, 171 Decolonizing Methodologies (Smith, L.), 13 democracy, 7, 47 Department of Energy (DOE)(US), 117 Department of Health and Human Services (US), 33, 95 Department of Science and Technology (S.Africa), 117 Deutscher Wetterdienst, 97 development, 10, 16–18 digital media digitalisation, 121 inequality, 75 publishing, 141 scholarship, 75 tools, 64, 67, 75, 152 disability, 15 disciplines academic requirements, 55 within climate change domain, 44, 95–9, 107–8, 149 covered by PLOS ONE, 107 within gender knowledge domain, 25, 29, 100–1, 107, 109–10 hierarchy of the sciences, 170–1, 174 history and definitions, 5–6, 10 within HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 34, 36, 38–9, 99–100, 108, 149

STEM, 125 Web of Science coverage, 87–8, 90 documentary analysis, 180, 189 domains of knowledge see also climate change knowledge domain; gender knowledge domain; HIV/AIDS knowledge domain national contributions, 101–6 recognition of, 23 dual publishing, 79 Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development), 47 earth systems science, 160 eBooks, 122 ECO-92, 47 ecology, 96, 179 economics, 17, 39, 56, 71, 97, 155, 181 economy of knowledge, 7–16, 126, 146, 150, 154–6, 170–5 education, 17, 30, 118–19 Elsevier, 64, 109 email, 54, 66, 152 emissions, 43, 45, 85 empire, 8, 12, 16–17, 20, 151, 170 encuentros, 158 endangered species, 44, 73 energy efficiency, 57 renewable, 45, 48 studies, 56, 72 supplies and access, 56 engineering, 9, 47, 56, 96, 181 England as part of Northern hegemony, 27, 101, 110 publications in WoS, 101–6 English language, 11, 66, 79, 88, 131, 137–9, 153–4 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (US), 117 epidemic (HIV/AIDS) see HIV/AIDS, history epidemiology, 23, 34–5, 74, 79, 149, 157, 179 epistemes, 12, 158, 164–5, 174 epistemology, 3, 13, 161, 167 ethnography Australia, 60–5 Brazil, 58–60, 62–5, 189 classic, 2 global, 188 organisational, 54–65, 188 South Africa, 56–8, 62–5 Eurocentrism, 12 European Research Council, 117 European Union, 117, 151 evaluation, 30, 124, 128, 132 exceptionalism, South African, 150 exclusion, 15 experts, local, 85

209

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

export market, 137 ‘extraversion,’ 10, 81, 84–6, 164, 173 Facebook, 18, 74–5, 152 FARMANGUINHOS, 38–9 Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), 47 Female Eunuch, The (Greer), 25 feminism activism, 161, 163 Australia, 24–7, 82 Brazil, 27–30, 165–6 gender and knowledge, 3 history, 23–4, 93 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 42 internationalisation of, 169 Latin America, 158 Marxist, 82 post-colonial, 165–6 publishing, 25, 32, 42, 107, 165 second wave, 93 South Africa, 30–3 Web of Science entries, 110 women’s studies, 25–6, 82, 157–8 Feminist Africa, 32, 165 fieldwork, 188–90 Flinders University, 34 food security, 96 forced migration, 96 Ford Foundation, 17, 27, 117, 143, 147, 157 foreign rights, 137 for-profit journals, 135–6 publishers, 121–2, 136, 187 universities, 21 foundations, 119, 172 see specific foundations by name Frankfurt Book Fair, 144 free market capitalism, 18–20 funding see also grants Australia, 113–15 Brazil, 113–15 climate change knowledge domain, 115–16 foreign / international, 32, 39, 42, 52, 55, 72, 112, 116–17 gender knowledge domain, 116 government, 20, 35, 46, 48, 55–6, 60, 83, 112–17, 119 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 115–16 local, 32 mixed, 113–16 non-government, 27, 55, 113–17, 119, 147–8 in the periphery, 11, 32 soft-funding, 55, 62 South Africa, 113–15 World Bank, 38

gay communities, 35–6, 101, 161 Gay Liberation, 35 gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), 94 gender bias in citation indices, 125 as categorical concept, 90, 110, 185 as relational concept, 90–2, 110, 185 research authors, 29, 111–12 sex and, 90–2 Gender and Development, 71 ‘Gender Unit’ (Aust.), 60–5, 188 gender knowledge domain see also women’s studies Australia, 24–7, 60–5, 93, 155, 165, 169 Brazil, 27–30, 112, 147 conferences, 93 definitions, 90–2, 185 disciplines within, 25, 29, 100–1, 107 funding, 116, 155 gender of authors, 111–12 gender studies, 23, 26, 90–1, 149, 151 Germany, 101–2 highest ranked journals, 107–10 history, 23, 26, 93, 169, 179 indexes, 184 knowledge creation, 3 national contributions, 101–6 Northern frameworks, 82 publications, 89–92 South Africa, 30–3, 82, 165–6, 169 translations, 147 Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL)(US), 97 Germany climate change knowledge domain, 43, 101–2 gender knowledge domain, 101 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 102 Ministry of Education and Research, 117 publications in WoS, 101–3, 110 scientific history, 6, 10 university presses, 142 GlaxoSmithKline, 117 ‘global ethnography,’ 188 Global Programme on AIDS (WHO), 149 Global Public Health, 71 global rankings, 66, 142 see also universities, league tables global science, 66 globalisation, 3, 8–16, 65, 67, 123, 179 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, 117 grant writing, 80 grants aid, 17, 60, 147 research, 56, 60–1 greenhouse gas, 57 Guadalajara International Book Fair, 144

210

Subject Index

Hadley Centre (UK), 97 Harvard, 124, 148 Hecate, 25 Herman Slade Foundation, 117 hierarchy of the sciences, 107–10, 171 h-index, 84 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 1 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain see also AIDS Australia, 34–7, 157 Brazil, 37–9, 58–60, 112, 166–7 conferences, 95 disciplines within, 34, 36, 38–9, 99–101, 149 funding, 115–16, 155 funding decline, 39, 102 gender of authors, 112 Germany, 102 highest ranked journals, 107–10 history, 14, 23, 33–4, 94–5, 169, 172, 179 indexes, 184 medical/scientific model, 151 national contributions, 101–6 publications, 89–91 South Africa, 39–42, 112, 151, 157–8, 169, 171 ‘Southern’ dimension, 95 virology and epidemiological techniques, 82 homophobia, 27, 94 Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (Altman), 25 Hong Kong, 128, 131–3, 137, 177, 186–7 see also China HPTN052, 41 Human Research Ethics Office, 188 humanities climate change knowledge domain, 95, 99 CODESRIA, 143 gender knowledge domain, 24, 91, 100 hierarchy of sciences, 107, 119, 125–6 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 34, 39, 99–100 independent scholars, 7 journal evaluation, 75 marginalisation, 170 Northern dominance, 13 hydrology, 95–6 Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim), 1 impact factors, 124, 126 imperialism, 15 indexes alternative, 143 citation, 125 commercial, 122, 130, 135–6, 138 Northern hegemony, 127

online, 123 Web of Science, 87–90, 93, 98, 183–4 indexing companies, 123, 130, 135 indexing systems, 88, 136 indigenous knowledge, 13–14, 46 inequalities Brazil, 47, 167 digital, 75 gender, 24, 28–9, 40, 61, 93, 175 geo-political, 123 global, 11–13, 51–3, 140, 175 knowledge, 23, 112, 120 language, 131 resource, 147 South Africa, 133, 159 between universities, 22 information elite, 3 society, 1, 3 information technology, 66–71 INPE (National Institute for Space Research) (Brazil), 47 Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (Brazil), 47 intellectual labour, 3–5 intellectual property rights, 22 intellectual workforce, 3–5, 12, 18, 151 see also knowledge workers intelligentsia, 3 Interdisciplinary Brazilian Association of AIDS(ABIA), 37 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 10, 23, 42–4, 47–8, 52, 73, 76–7, 85, 94, 96, 149, 155, 157, 169 International AIDS Conference(s), 95 International AIDS Society, 34 International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), 49 International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), 150 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 19 International Women’s Year, 27, 93 internationalisation, 65, 72, 129, 139, 153–4, 169 internet, 70, 73, 123, 169, 176, 185–6 interviews, 181–2 intraversion, 129, 145, 173 ‘invisible colleges,’ 11 ISA Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions (Patel), 14 Johns Hopkins, 64 Joint United Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), 37, 117, 149 Journal of Climate (JCLI), 107, 147 Journal of Geophysical Research, 147 Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society, 154

211

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

journals English language, 79, 88, 131, 137–9, 153–4 global publication levels, 6 hierarchy of the sciences, 107–10, 170 indexed by WoS, 87–8 league tables, 22 low impact, 84 Northern hegemony, 78, 84, 107, 110 open access system, 134–6, 156 peer-reviewed, 6 print, 123 refereed, 156 standardisation, 122 vs books, 88, 122, 126–7, 130 JSTOR, 122 Kirby Centre, 35 knowledge coloniality, 15 commercialisation, 121, 170, 175 commodification, 20–2 ‘disciplines,’ 10 economy, 7–16, 126, 146, 150, 154–6, 170–5 endogenous, 14 exclusion, 15 indigenous, 13–14, 46, 161, 165, 174 institutions, 5–7 local, 68, 86, 159–63, 174–5 multiple perspectives, 161–2, 164 peripheral data sources, 150 place-based, 14 ‘process,’ 67 sociology of, 2–3 knowledge workers see also intellectual workforce Australia, 60–5 Brazil, 58–60, 62–5 context, 1, 3 democratic activism, 7 descriptions, 3 ‘extraversion,’ 10 global connections, 71–6 methods, 2 peripheral, 11–12 South Africa, 56–8, 62–5 Southern tier, 53–6, 65–86, 118–19, 146–67, 171–5 subaltern positions, 86 tools, 66–71 work practices, 57, 59, 62–71, 80, 163–4, 169–70 ‘knowledge-intensive work,’ 4 Kyoto Protocol, 43 Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Latour & Woolgar), 2

laboratory studies, 2 climate research, 97 ethnography, 188 government, 96 HIV/AIDS, 58, 64, 149, 163–4, 188 pharmaceutical, 7, 38 labour intensification, 75 international divisions, 10–12, 173 Lancet, The, 85 languages see also translation African, 137 barriers, 79, 118 Chinese, 88, 131 dominance of English, 11, 66, 79, 88, 130–1, 137–40, 154 Portuguese, 65, 138, 185 Spanish, 138, 144 Web of Science, 88 Latin American Center for Social Science Research (CLAPCS), 18 Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLASCO), 18 Lawyers for Human Rights, 32 league tables, 7, 10, 21 Leverhulme Trust, 117 libraries, 87, 122, 152 life history method, 176, 180–2, 190 life sciences, 91–2, 96, 99–100, 125, 134 linking workforce, 148–9, 151, 167, 172, 175 literature searches, 64, 70–1, 79, 82 London School of Tropical Health and Hygiene, 41, 117 Macmillan, 140 Making the Difference (Connell, Ashenden, Kessler & Dowsett), 26 managerialism, 21–2 Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the ‘Greenhouse’ Effect (Sawyer), 93 marginality, 11, 15, 173, 176 mathematics, 5, 68 Max Planck Institute, 50 Medical Research Council of South Africa, 117 medical/scientific model, 99, 107, 110, 126, 151 medicine as applied science, 9 biomedicine, 91–2, 96, 99–100 Foucault on, 2 gender domain, 61, 110, 116 HIV/AIDS domain, 38 open access journals, 134 PLOS ONE, 107 social, 70, 80 social aspects, 70

212

Subject Index

MeJane, 25 MenEngage, 30 Merck, 117 meteorology, 8, 43, 96, 160, 179 Meteorology Office (UK), 97 methodology, 159, 166, 170, 177, 186 metrics, 7, 75, 125–6 see also bibliometric analysis metropole dominance in journal publishing, 10 dominance in knowledge production, 9–11, 15, 55, 82, 146–7 effects on post colonial societies, 15 journals, 85 modelling frameworks, 81–2 prestige of training and conferences, 10 publication decline, 167 work practices, 81 microbiology, 96 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 96 Ministry for Science and Education (Poland), 117 mitigation, 51–2, 57, 155, 157, 159 Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS), 143 modelling, 43–4, 67–9, 75, 81–2, 160 modernity, 3, 15 monographs, 126, 137, 143 mosaic epistemology, 13 Movimento Feminino pela Anistia, 28 multi-tasking, 74, 79 Muqaddimah (Khaldun), 14 NASA, 50, 148, 152 National Aeronautics Space Agency (NASA), 117 National AIDS Programme (Brazil), 39 National Association of People with AIDS (US), 94 National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)(US), 97 National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (Aust.), 35 National Centre in HIV Social Research (Aust.), 35 National Centre in HIV Virology Research (Aust.), 35 National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF)(Aust.), 46 National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (Brazil), 117 National Council for Scientific Research (CNPq) (Brazil), 18, 39 National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)(Aust.), 60–1, 97, 116 National HIV/AIDS Strategy (Aust.), 35

National Institutes of Health (NIH), 33, 151 National Institutes of Health (NIH)(US), 117 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)(US), 117 National Research Foundation (S. Africa), 75 National Research Foundation (NRF) (S.Africa), 50, 155 National Science Foundation (NSF)(US), 111, 117, 184 Native Life in South Africa (Plaatje), 12 Natural Environment Research Council (UK), 117 natural sciences, 66, 75, 82, 96, 121, 125 see also physical sciences Nature, 84, 147 neoliberalism, 18–21, 126, 156, 169, 172 Netherlands, The, 103, 108, 110, 143, 149 networking, 7, 72 networks academic, 86 academic-practitioner, 163 Brazil, 157 gender, 29, 165 global, 11, 38, 43–5, 54, 66, 72–3, 123, 152 knowledge, 180 local, 12 regional, 157, 167, 175 scientific, 125 service, 30 social, 29, 162 Southern, 143–4, 151–2, 172 trade, 12 New England Journal of Medicine, 84 Nobel Prizes, 6 non-government organisations (NGO), 18, 29–30, 37–9, 73, 151, 159, 166, 172 Northern hegemony citation counts, 67 definition, 150, 166 dimensions, 147, 150 funding sources, 52, 55, 112, 150 humanities and social sciences, 13 intellectual agendas, 9–11, 15, 78, 81, 150–1, 173 journal publication, 107–10, 119, 127, 129–31, 147, 150 national contributions to WoS, 101–6 publication patterns, 87–119 publishing industry, 127–45, 171 resource inequality, 147 responses to climate change, 52 social sciences, 13 university rankings, 124–5, 150 uptake of Southern research, 12 North/South linking workforce, 148–9, 151, 167, 172, 175 North-South relationship, 11

213

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

observation, 2, 8–9, 44, 68–9, 189 oceanography, 49, 96 open access, 134–6, 156 Oppressed Theatre, 84 oral history method, 148, 180–1 organisations case studies, 188 ethnography, 54–65, 188 organisational cultures, 59, 62, 65 Origin of Species. The (Darwin), 9 Outra Coisa, 37 outsourcing, 21–2, 122 Oxford University, 124, 148 Oxford University Press, 122 Palgrove, 140 Pasteur Institute, 34, 94 peer-review informal, 61 journal articles, 6, 37, 75, 96, 130, 143 required, 57, 65 reviewers, 139 performance measurement, 21, 124–6, 130 periphery academic status, 55 as data source, 10, 150 economy of knowledge, 11–12, 150–1 ‘extraversion,’ 10, 22, 81 journals, 87 neoliberalism, 19 online access to resources, 152 scientific agendas, 72 source of raw materials, 10 work practices, 81 Perspectives in Education, 42 Pfizer, 117 pharmaceutical industry, 7, 10, 40, 116–17, 151 philanthropy, 113, 143 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society), 6 physical sciences, 9, 91–2, 97–100, 112, 170 see also natural sciences physics, 67–9, 82, 96–7, 107, 149, 160 Plaatje, Solomon Tshekisho, 12 PLOS, 71 PLOS Medicine, 71 PLOS ONE, 107–10, 156 pneumocystis pneumonia, 94 Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 93 post colonial societies, 15–16 post colonial theory, 13, 165–6, 174 post graduate studies, 118–19, 148 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (US), 117 principal investigators, 74, 160, 177, 190 PROALCOOL, 48 professionals, 4, 26, 58, 121, 136, 172, 175

professions, 4, 158 promotion, 55, 57, 84, 96, 124, 126, 131 Promundo, 30 pseudonyms, 182, 186–8 public health, 17 climate change, 96, 181 gender domain, 61, 181 HIV/AIDS domain, 34, 40, 60, 63, 70, 95, 179, 181 public policy, 29, 127, 165–6 public sector, 18, 20, 144 publication patterns, 87–119 see also journals; publishers; publishing publishers alternative, 143 Australian, 25, 122, 136 Brazil, 138–9 Indian, 103, 143 Latin American, 143 major international, 64, 84–5, 108–9, 121, 128, 130–3, 136–8, 147 Pan-African, 143 social sciences, 121 South Africa, 137, 143 Southern, 84, 120, 129, 133, 136–40, 147, 171, 174 trade presses, 140–1 university presses, 122, 129, 132–3, 136–8, 140–2 publishing commodification, 121, 127–31 companies, 6, 121–3 dominant disciplines, 107 globalisation of, 123 government subsidies for, 132, 140, 142 industry, 120–3, 136–40, 170 on-line, 93, 122–3, 134 open access system, 134–6, 156 packages, 122 quality control, 135–6 two-track, 79, 85, 153 PubMed, 152 Quacquarelli Symonds system, 124 qualitative analysis, 75, 182, 186 quantitative methods, 59, 66, 124–6, 185 Quipú, 12 Rachel Carson Centre (Germany), 97 racism, 26, 29, 86, 132, 162 rankings international, 55 journals, 64, 75, 79, 85, 107, 136, 153 South Africa, 31 universities, 66, 124–6, 130, 142 recruitment, 80, 180 redundancy, 22

214

Subject Index

Reed-Elsevier, 6 Refractory Girl, 25 regional hubs, 143, 157–8 remote-sensing technology, 148 research centres Australia, 60–2 Brazil, 58–60, 62 independent, 55–6, 62 South Africa, 57 state funded, 58–60, 62 ‘Restoring the Quality of Our Environment’ (Science Advisory Committee, US), 93 restructuring, 22 Revista de Estudos Feministas, 28 Rio de Janeiro, 30, 38–9, 47, 58, 68, 176 Rockefeller Foundation, 17 Royal Society, the, 6, 8 ‘rules of the game,’ 128 Russian Academy of Science, 97 Ryan Licht Sang Foundation, 117 sabbatical, 27, 153 ‘Safe Schools’ programme, 27 Sage, 140 Salix Pharmaceuticals, 117 Sâo Paolo, 37, 39, 55 Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), 117 Saudi Wildlife Commission, 117 scholarship climate change, 50 digital, 75 feminist, 24, 82, 163 gender studies, 31 HIV/AIDS, 37–8 international, 70–1, 140 Northern, 11, 32, 136 sexualities, 33 Southern, 144 tools, 66 universities, 123 SCI-E, 183–4 Science, 34, 84, 147 Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), 138, 154, 174 sea change, 68 sea-levels, 76–7, 159, 164 Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 107, 109–10 Shandong University (China), 117 Shanghai Jiao Tong Institute, 124 Silent Spring (Carson), 93 Skype, 66 Smithsonian, the, 117 social determination, 1–3 social justice, 69 social media, 29, 74–5 Social Medicine Institute (Brazil), 38

social movements Brazil, 37 climate change, 47 feminism, 24 gender domain, 161, 168, 179 HIV/AIDS, 37, 40 Southern, 167, 175 social sciences citation indices, 125 within climate change domain, 44, 49, 69, 72, 95, 97, 99 climate change knowledge domain, 155 disability studies, 15 within gender domain, 24, 90–1, 107 heterogeneity, 14 history, 8 within HIV/AIDS domain, 34–5, 39, 70–1, 80, 99–101 HIV/AIDS knowledge domain, 155–6 marginalisation, 170 Northern dominance, 10, 13 peripheral data sources, 10 post-colonial, 13–16, 167 publishers, 121 social geography, 97 treatment of indigenous peoples, 13 Web of Science, 91 Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), 135, 183–4 Society in Transition, 42 sociology American, 111 climate change domain, 97 ‘connected sociologies,’ 14 of family life, 24 feminist, 25, 31 gender domain, 61 global, 129 industrial, 3, 16 of knowledge, 2–3, 111, 176 post-colonial, 13, 15–16, 167 of professions, 4 publishing, 141 research funding, 134 Web of Science, 90 Sociology of Science, The (Merton), 2 soft-funding, 55–6, 62 South African National Research Foundation (NRF), 117 Southern African Development Community, 137 Southern consciousness, 65 Southern theory, 13, 15–16 Southern tier workforce, 53–6, 65–86, 118–19, 146–67, 171–5 South/North/South travel and training, 148–9, 151–3

215

KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER

South-South partnerships, 143, 158, 165, 167, 174–5 SouthSouthNorth (SSN), 143 Speak, 32 Springer and Sage, 6 SPSS software, 111, 185 standpoint epistemology, 3 Stanford, 124 STEM disciplines, 125 student fees, 21, 54 Study A, 176–7, 180–2, 189 Study B, 110–19, 176–7, 182–7, 190 Study C, 176–7, 187–90 study leave, 27, 153 subordination, 81, 174 surveillance epidemiological, 37 managerial, 22, 57, 65–6, 177 Swedish Research Council, 117 Swiss National Science Foundation, 117 Tagore, Rabindranath, 13 tariffs, 137 Taylor and Francis, 6 teaching gender studies, 27, 32, 166 institutions, 136 pressure to publish, 127, 130, 132 research and, 25, 56, 65, 80, 158, 173 tenure, 21, 55, 65, 75, 141, 180 Terrence Higgins Trust (UK), 95 thematic analysis, 182, 186–7 thermodynamics, 96 Thomson [publisher], 64 Thomson Reuters, 87–8 see also Clarivate Analytics Times Higher Education World University Rankings, 124 transcriptions, 176 Transformation., 42 transgender activism, 75 translation costs, 131, 137–40 from English, 137–8, 140, 147 to English, 137, 144 services, 139 Trapnell Fund, 117 Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) (S. Africa), 40, 161 trusts, 95, 113–17 Twitter, 74 two-track publishing, 79, 85, 153 UNICAMP, 38 United Nations, 27, 30, 85, 96, 143 Joint United Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), 37, 117, 149

United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), 47 United Nations Decade for Women, 93, 149 United Nations Educational, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 17–18, 27 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 43 United Nations World Conferences on Women, 93 United States climate change domain, 43–4, 47–8, 97, 148 collaborations, 118 corporate foundations, 17 corporate oligarchy, 16 gender domain, 27, 29, 31–2, 82, 93, 116 HIV/AIDS, 25, 94 HIV/AIDS domain, 33–4, 36–9, 42, 60, 64, 71, 79, 81, 83, 94 internal publication market, 137 journals, 22, 87 neoliberalism, 19 post graduate studies, 118 publishers, 186 publishing dominance, 101–6, 108–10, 119, 128–9, 173 research funding, 20, 113, 117, 151, 157 research organisations, 117 sociology, 129 study participants, 177, 187 universities, 5–6, 10, 21, 127 university presses, 140–1 university rankings, 124 US centrism, 78 Web of Science coding, 101 women authors, 111–12 universalism, 14 universality, 15, 171, 174 universities Australia, 54, 123–5 Brazil, 55 commercialisation, 123, 126 elite, 10, 150, 173 employment conditions, 55, 172 entrepreneurial, 18, 20–1 faculties, 121 for-profit, 21 league tables, 11, 21, 66, 123–6, 130, 132–3 managerialism, 21–2, 172 research, 6, 16, 22 sandstone, 125 South Africa, 54, 56 state supported, 17–18, 55 student fees, 21, 54 university presses, 122, 129, 132–3, 136–8, 140–2

216

Subject Index

University of California, 94 University of Cape Town, 52, 143, 177 University of Guadalajara, 144 University of Munich, 97 University of Sydney, 177, 186, 188 University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO), 122 US News and World Report, 124 violence, 15, 25, 30, 32, 161, 175 virology, 23, 82, 149, 179 Weather Bureau (Aust.), 97 Web of Science content, 183–5 context-content analysis on, 111 Core Collection, 183 disciplines indexed, 87–93 hierarchy of the sciences, 107–10 lack of gender variable, 110 limits to funding data, 110–11 national contributions, 101–6 Wellcome Trust, 117 Wilderness Society, 117 Wiley-Blackwell, 6 Women and Gender conference (S. Africa, 1991), 32 Women’s Liberation Movement, 23, 25 women’s studies, 25–6, 82, 157–8 see also gender knowledge domain work-life balance, 57 World AIDS Day, 34 World Bank, 19, 30, 38 World Climate Conference (1979), 23, 43, 93 World Health Organization (WHO), 17, 30, 34, 37, 41, 60, 90, 95, 112, 148–9, 152 World Meteorological Association, 93–4 writing, 76–80 zoology, 8, 96

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KNOWLEDGE AND GLOBAL POWER MAKING NEW SCIENCES IN THE SOUTH FRAN COLLYER, RAEWYN CONNELL, JOÃO MAIA AND ROBERT MORRELL Knowledge and Global Power is a ground-breaking international study which examines how knowledge is produced, distributed and validated globally. The former imperial nations – the rich countries of Europe and North America – still have a hegemonic position in the global knowledge economy. Fran Collyer, Raewyn Connell, João Maia and Robert Morrell, using interviews, databases and fieldwork, show how intellectual workers respond in three Southern tier countries, Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study focusses on new, socially and politically important research fields: HIV/AIDS, climate change and gender studies. The research demonstrates emphatically that ‘place matters’, that research and scholarship are shaped by global relationships. But it also shows that knowledge workers in the global South have room to move: they can set distinctive agendas and form local knowledge.

ISBN: 9781925495768 (pb) ISBN: 9781925495775 (pdf ) ISBN: 9781925495782 (epub)