Typically, disciplines are what link teaching to a specific institution.
Disciplines are how universities manage and mediate the orthodoxies of established truths. Research, on the other hand, is usually less linked to a particular place, fulfilling the notion that ‘knowledge knows no borders’. In Norhed’s selection of projects up to the end of 2018, cross-disciplinary research is foregrounded. Projects selected for fund-ing were mainly by researchers who formed themselves into cross-disciplinary committees. However, a second focus area for Norhed is enhancing teaching, and thereby capacity building, through support-ing master’s and PhD programmes (with the help of spatially accessible networks). This element binds the whole programme in terms of both place and space.
The question asked in relation to funding research at any university is how to make the research link with teaching in mutually productive ways. If teaching is place and discipline bound but research easily wan-ders around in ‘undisciplined’ (or, at least, inter- or multidisciplinary) space, this question is also about how to link local commitments with global knowledge-needs via interactions within the academic profes-sion that Norhed makes possible. In other words, the space and place categories overlap in terms of how disciplines reproduce themselves (by setting boundaries with other disciplines, certifying graduates, creating links with professional associations, etc.) and how the spaces in which new knowledge is produced through research are constructed.
Of course, this does not mean that no new knowledge is produced in disciplines that are held together by teaching. Most of the research at
universities has disciplinary renewal as part of its primary purpose and the strengthening of the academic profession as a central goal. In this, the academic profession holds place and space together, while watching over disciplinary quality.4
Norhed enters into this dialectic by supporting better master’s and PhD education linked to solid research projects. Ideally, Norhed pro-jects foster active research supervision of PhD and master’s students based on ongoing research collaborations that strengthen the academic profession. Most disciplines in the countries where Norhed projects are located are shaped according to the disciplines of their Western colonis-ers. These, in turn, grew out of the combination of the Enlightenment and industrialisation eras and through the slow process of modernisa-tion. Authors concerned about the ‘historical origins of the knowledge economy’ talk of the spread of the modern economy as the ‘ultimate triumph of the Industrial Enlightenment’ (Mokyr 2002: 288). (In the contemporary era, it is probably more accurate to reference the OECD than the West, as Mexico, Chile and a number of other LMICs wait in the wings to play a role as movers and shakers in this ‘triumph’; see Halvorsen 2016.)
Less discussed is how much the industrial revolution’s ‘successes’
depended on the division of labour between disciplines that had evolved in the universities, turning them into secular tools for the dif-ferentiation of society. Usually the peer system reproduces disciplines.
Master’s and even PhD programmes are still generally embedded in a single discipline. The Norhed programme faces the difficult dilemma of how to promote knowledge through disciplines, but more so through interdisciplinary work, or even through abandoning Western discipli-nary divisions, as advocated by those who support decolonisation of knowledge, including those who are most repressed and discriminated against by so-called ‘first-world people’ (Smith 1999; see also Krøvel, Chapter 4, this volume).
Heilbron (1995: 269) argues that what holds the Western university model together are its disciplines:
Disciplines in the modern sense thus became the central unit of the modern intellectual regime. What was previously ranked
under the common heading of ‘natural philosophy’ now became disciplined and led to a division in mathematics, physics, chem-istry and biology. A similar transition occurred somewhat later from ‘natural law’ and ‘moral philosophy’ to different social sciences.
With growing interest in cross-disciplinary work, critiques of the detri-mental consequences of the industrialisation have come to the forefront (see, for example, much of the work done by APPEAR mentioned ear-lier), along with many types of knowledge suppressed through disciplining (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2015). Intellectual imperialism is transformed into intellectual hegemony. This is due not only to the patent system and the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights agreement (the West’s means of creating knowledge commodities) but mostly to the dominance of the West’s ‘worldview’ of what knowledge is relevant.
Much of the debate about post-colonial knowledge has evolved in countries that adopted the university models of their oppressors, including their curricula, modes of teaching, ideas about socialisation, identity formation, and formation of the self (Mbembe 2017). In a study conducted for the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research, titled Decolonizing Knowledge:
From Development to Dialogue, Frédérike Apffel-Marglin and Stephan Marglin (1996) challenge claims to the universality of modern forms of knowledge, noting that such claims serve to justify the exporting of the universities established by the colonial powers. Arguing that Cartesian rationality – ‘the motor that has fuelled the Industrial Revolution’
(1996: 2) – has colonised minds as well, they note that this has pre-vented other knowledge, on everything from farming methods and medicine to cosmology and how society functions best, from being recognised or respected. As a result, intellectual and cultural life are decimated and colonial administration systems are superimposed over social institutions to repress and undermine existing social values.
Meanwhile, hegemonic disciplines from reputable universities, with their instrumental focus on specialised knowledge, ensure that a nar-row set of ‘international best practices’ are imposed worldwide.
Apffel-Marglin and Marglin show how the economics profession, in particular, cleansed itself of all doubt about its universal value (even though Keynes himself warned against this so strongly).
Obrecht (2015) notes that in some fields, the costs of specialisation have been so high that Cartesian ontology has become counterproduc-tive to the planet as a whole. As Mbembe argues (2017: 179) ‘there is only one world’, yet this understanding is somehow lost in the plurality of specialisations in the industrial world.5 In fact, this argument was put forward by the UN University in 1996, twenty years before the adoption of the SDGs:
It is not only animal and plant species that are becoming extinct at an ever-faster pace but human forms of life and thought. The latter can only be justified by a belief in progress, in the replace-ment of ‘outmoded’ ways of knowing and doing by more advanced ways of knowing and doing. The downside of progress and of development is creating a mood congenial to revisiting local forms of knowledge as well as to questioning the claims to universality of modern thought. What is happening in the world, whether the First or the Third, looks more and more like loss: loss of environmental integrity, loss of a diversity not only of plant and animal species but of human ways of doing and knowing. What only yesterday looked outmoded, today looks sustainable. (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1996: 2)
All this implies that other cultures, with different presuppositions about the mind–body relationship, the interdependencies between society and nature, and the relative values of intuitive and empirical knowledge, have the potential to inspire totally different kinds of disci-plines and (probably more sound) relations between humans and the rest of nature. Norhed invites partners in the South to build on the knowledge in their own localities, and is open to the potential offered by cross-disciplinary work in which ‘experiments’ with forms of knowl-edge might be possible, even if these contradict the Cartesian divides (between mind and body, human and nature) and have the potential to create new disciplines. In addition, this creates the potential for
reflection and learning, especially for Norwegian partners who tend to be submerged in Cartesian universalism (in the disciplines of medicine, economics and accounting, for example). But more importantly, this highlights how Norhed is involved in global debates about our shared world and its challenges, and is helping to legitimise and encourage stronger academic responses to global challenges. As part of the Norwegian state, Norad may indicate what knowledge is relevant but the work done by Norhed projects that are linked into this new global discourse may make us see things differently. Ownership of the pro-gramme is one thing, moral commitment is another, and to most academics the latter is what counts.