1 Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be
1 Inequitable Power Dynamics of Global Knowledge Production and Exchange Must be Confronted Head On
Laura Czerniewicz
Showing “The World of Science”, this map representing global scholarly publishing as expressed through science journals’ publishing in the mid 2000s. It makes a dramatic point about the complexities of global inequalities in knowledge production and exchange. What would it take to redraw the knowledge production map to realise a vision of a more equitable and accurate world of knowledge?
Disparities
Knowledge creation and dissemination are, of course, crucially shaped by the practicalities of money and technology. It is significant that the average R& D intensity (R&D as a percentage of GDP) for OECD countries was 2.4% in 2009, while few developing countries had reached 1% (Mjwara et al 2013). These percentages of national funds are important differentiators in what is possible; without comparable levels of support researchers in resource-poor environments must spend inordinate amounts of time fundraising and dealing with external grant-giving organisations, are limited in their ability to participate in scholarly community activities, and so are often constrained in the research they can undertake. Infrastructure also shapes what is possible; for example maps of internet cable clearly show how collaboration between those in the global north is enabled by substantial bandwidth while north-south and south-south connections are not.
Values and practices
These technical, financial and even mechanical issues are easy to identify, and so it is tempting to put one’s faith in the idea that more money and machines will solve the problems of knowledge production inequality. Values and practices – which legitimate certain interests and not others – contribute just as much to global imbalances as material disparities do. The positioning of these science journals is not neutral: engagement with them is characterised by several levels of uneven participation. They operate within a discourse in which “international” really means “global north”. This paradigm is reinforced by the strong reliance on the ISI Impact Factor, leading to an anomalous situation in which researchers from the global South must tailor their research to be of interest to high impact journals serving a Northern research agenda.
For example, a study of four high impact journals in the management social sciences found that they attracted authors from many countries but their empirical sites of investigation were significantly located in Europe and North America (Hamman, R. Balancing the academic terms of trade: The paradox of publishing in top-tier journals from the periphery. unpublished, available from author). This indicates the extent to which local researchers will use their scarce resources to achieve publication in the high impact journals, supposedly international. Given the overall constrained research environments in which these researchers operate, these resources