Okay, I'm typing this on my iPhone keyboard since the laptop the nyu library just rented me doesn't seem to have functioning Internet access, I need to prepare for my diss proposal defense Tuesday, and I woke up at 4 this morning because of a car horn sypmhony outside my window, so this is probably going to be both bad and short. That said, I did want to get a post up about the articles we read this week from Inter-asia Cultural Studies on university rankings, corporatization, and locally useful knowledge production.
It was initially interesting to me that Myungkoo Kang's discussion of the neocolonial predicament of South Korean universities, in his "'State-guided' university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production" mentions not at all the significant movement against neoliberal globalization which Kuan-Hsing Chen and Sechin Y.S. Chien describe in that country. Chen and Chien ("Knowledge production in the era of neoliberal globalization: reflections on the changing academic conditions in Taiwan") claim that the alterglobalization movement in Korea "has attained such a level that the National Alliance of Progressive Professors is engaged in organizing a labor union of university teachers.". (224). This "relatively massive progressive force within the South Korean academic community," has been, they note, thus far unable to stave off the colonizing tyranny of the Social Science Ciation Index (SSCI). Presumably even some of these "progressive" faculty endorse the SSCI as marker of scholarly distinction and rigor. Yet Chen and Chien are sanguine about the possibilities for such an organization as that which the NAPP has undertaken to build.
Kang ignores such a project altogether. One could ascribe nefarious motives here - he is, after all, a dean, and deans tend to have a rather dim view of academic labor organizing, at least in the U.S. But I think there are other, equally salient questions to be raised here about Kang's findings and argument.
First, what might more locally oriented knowledge production mean? What's at stake in this call? Is this import-substitution academic knowledge production, academic nationalism, or qua Walter Mignolo, an attempt to trace the local histories which limn, demarcate, and traverse what Quijano calls "the coloniality of power"? Is it some combination thereof? Certainly the SSCI's reign marks 'colonial conditions' of knowdge production for South Korean universities, but is it a cause or a symptom? Can the research university ever not be a colonial apparatus? To whom would "locally suitable" knowledge be "suitable," and for what uses?
More when I get to an actual computer, maybe...
hey, this is a great point about the contradiction between Kang and Chen/Chien's view of south korea (not to mention the very interesting ethnographic portrait given by Abelmann et al). I just got back from my little vacation yesterday (later than planned), will post tomorrow about the papers.
ReplyDeleteI really like your ending questions too. One of the most interesting points coming out of this set of papers was that the domination of SCI/SSCI rankings means that local research problems and local contexts tend to be suppressed, because they're not considered relevant by the American journals that are the highest-ranked. I mean, it's weird because Americans don't even necessarily NOTICE that their journals are considered world standards elsewhere in the world. I don't think most American social scientists are actively national parochialists; they're just indifferent to different nations' academic worlds. So it's a massive irony that American academic research gets treated as hegemonic, as some sort of universal standard, when it is really just as parochial as anyone else. (Just talking at the level of research publication here I mean.)
That said, you raise some major questions about what this local research might entail, and I don't have any answers at present, but will think about it...
good luck with your defense. Do you have a research proposal? I'd love to take a look at it if it's not just oral.
eli t
Here's my further thought about local knowledge. This is actually a relatively complex category to parse, on an ideological level anyway, because so much of university neoliberalism contributes to blurring the boundaries between national and universal knowledge. In other words, as we know, an important component of university neoliberal reforms involves trying to integrate the nation into a seemingly translocal/universal sphere of knowledge-making that is at once globally recognized as valid science and is also likely to be commercially or economically valuable, not to say lucrative. When policymakers talk about encouraging innovation, I think they mean innovation that will be at once scientific progress and also confer on the nation a new advantage on the global market. So the kind of knowledge produced in this innovation is cast as apparently universal in its scientific and commercial implications but remains national in its origin and ownership.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the "universal" sphere of exchange or of scientific recognition is largely ideological fantasy, as demonstrated by the parochialism of english-language dominance that these articles criticized. But even so, it seems to me that "local knowledge" in the sense of knowledge *not* oriented towards global science or global markets fits uneasily into this schema, because for neoliberal reformers, the national (hence in a sense the local) has *already been assimilated to the global.* Like, if you believe that the only conceivable horizon of value for academic knowledge is the global/universal level, it becomes just unthinkable to advocate local knowledge in the sense of knowledge that wouldn't be globally recognizable as valid or wouldn't be profitable on global markets. Does this make any sense? My two cents on local knowledge.
Yes, and I think I agree. It's easy to recognize the coloniality inherent in the dynamics Kang, Chien and Chen, etc, sketch out, but the valorization of the local as a liberatory alternative is problematic for me because the university, and the university as a site of marketized knowledge production, seems to be a deeply colonized space regardless of where its gaze is turned, and Kang is certainly not offering us a vision of local knowledge which contests such an institutional space.
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