CGHE Webinar 188

Hegemony and inequality in global science: Problems of the centre-periphery model

Date: Tuesday, 16 February 2021 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Location: Zoom webinar, registration required

Speaker(s):

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Chair: Alis Oancea
Speakers: Simon Marginson & Xin Xu

The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, English-language publishing and cross-border authorship, is expanding at a rapid rate and has fostered the growth of national science infrastructure in a growing number of countries. The global geo-politics of science is changing: the United States remains the leading country but there are several strong systems outside Euro-America and China excels in total volume of papers and in some STEM disciplines. Paradoxically, however, this pluralisation plays out within a continuing Euro-American (and predominantly Anglo-American) science world regulated by an inside/outside binary. Global science remains unequalising and homogenising, primarily Anglo-American in its language, leading institutions, disciplinary and publishing regimes, agendas and topics. Other languages and insights are shut out, including endogenous (indigenous) knowledges. Scholarship on science has yet to effectively address these issues. Quantitative studies in scientometrics are under theorised. The dominant conceptual framework for explaining global science is world-systems theory and its centre-periphery model of national systems. However, this framework has passed its use-by date.

In this webinar, the speakers will critically review the centre-periphery model and its applications in science studies. The model is locked within the Eurocentrism it opposes and is unduly determinist. It cannot grasp the dynamics of the specifically global aspect of science; and radically under-estimates the potential for agency outside the ‘centre’ countries, as shown by the capacity of states on the ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’ to lift science and the scope for ‘peripheral’ scientists to operate autonomously. Advocates of world systems theory in science are forced into recurring modifications, or looser core concepts, signs of an obsolete paradigm. The presenters will argue for a critical focus on global hegemony, instead of the critique of the world as a centre-periphery formation, encompassing cultural factors as well as political economy, and for an ‘ecology of knowledges’ approach to science and knowledge systems.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford, founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education, and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods.

Dr Xin Xu

Xin Xu (许心) is a Departmental Lecturer in Higher/Tertiary Education at the University of Oxford. Her research concentrates on higher/tertiary education and research.

Professor Alis Oancea

Alis is Professor of Philosophy of Education and Research Policy at the University of Oxford and Project Lead (Research on Research) at the ESRC Centre for Global Higher Education, as well as Social Sciences Division Advocate for Impact (Responsible Engagement and Innovation). In recent years, she was Director of Research in the Oxford University Department of Education and REF2021 coordinator for the unit. Through scholarly and professional collaborations, she hopes to champion knowledge, justice, generosity and integrity in research practices and discourses, research policy and research leadership and cultures in different types of organisation. She has led and collaborated on research projects, change and development initiatives, and administrative processes on impact and knowledge exchange, and held advisory and leadership roles in education reform and research assessment. She has conducted research on research ecosystems, values in research, open knowledge, impact, ethics and integrity, epistemic diversity, research careers, understandings of quality and excellence, research assessment, research in teacher education, philosophy of research, and principled research practice. Alis is the joint editor of the Oxford Review of Education, chief editorial advisor on Routledge Open Research (Education), and co-editor of the forthcoming ‘Handbook of Meta-Research’ (Elgar). Alis Oancea led CGHE Project 3, ‘Research on Research: the research function and mission of higher education’.