Other research discussed at the March 2018 workshop included the work of the Austrian Partnership Programme in Higher Education and Research for Development (APPEAR), which documented 17 remarka-ble projects that focused on capacity building in higher education institutions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) (see Obrecht 2015). Overall, APPEAR highlighted epistemological commonalities as a basis for collaboration – that is, all 17 projects were driven by a ‘com-mon understanding of scientific enquiry’. This was supported by a shift in power relations similar to that being attempted by Norhed. As Andreas Obrecht put it,
Allowing higher education institutions in the partner countries to also be able to guarantee full responsibility for the project and its financial aspect proved to be the right decision to guar-antee a future partnership of equals. (2015: 17)
The ‘epistemic commonalities’ evolved out of the global challenges fac-ing our planet, and for which Western knowledge is largely to blame:
The dawning realization that the consequences of modern, rationalist knowledge have brought the world’s ecosystems and thus its people to the brink of global collapse is making us more sensitive to alternative knowledge systems and epistemologies.
(Obrecht 2015: 20)
However, despite the fact that the Western ‘worldview’ is precipitating
‘global collapse’, it is still seen by many as crucial in determining what knowledge is relevant. In this case, it supports the notion that collabo-ration, across regions and within a common understanding of science, is necessary to address the global crisis. Obrecht thus alerts us to the fact that, as academics from different cultures who work together on
projects, we have to be aware of our general presuppositions – that is, the frameworks or worldviews we think with, and that make our ideas about knowledge seem rational.
What such critiques of Western rationality or positivism underline, is what Norhed has adopted as its basic premise for projects it supports:
namely that projects’ theoretical underpinnings have to be clear. In other words, if co-operation between academics from different cultures is to succeed, project participants have to find ways of discussing how their presuppositions, which can sometimes be very different, guide their academic thinking and working methods. Until these are made explicit, any aspect of their work – from what constitutes a valid empir-ical observation to how to generalise findings – has to be open to question. When presuppositions remain implicit, hegemonic versions of ‘rationality’ tend to rule.
Jeffrey Alexander (1982) notes that our presuppositions guide our ideas about what we observe and how we interpret this. In an analysis of the scientific continuum, Alexander explains how research work involves going from observations to general presuppositions and back, but that general presuppositions direct our interpretations.2 In discuss-ing the same object of study, experts from different disciplines can allocate a wide variety of meanings or interpretations as they apply their own theories. As Alexander (1982: 33) puts it, ‘Theoretical con-frontation is, therefore, just as significant a factor in creating shifts in scientific commitment as empirical confrontation.’
For this reason, Norhed’s view is that the struggle between general theoretical presuppositions should be at the heart of relations between academics across global power structures. An awareness of this struggle alerts us to how Western experts’ implicit assumptions often justify theoretical domination, and encourage researchers to avoid confront-ing different interpretations of what might be seen as common empirical observations (Koch and Weingart 2016). Often, this hegem-ony masks what some researchers might see as their own disciplinary superiority (this can be likened to belief in the ‘objectivity’ of what is called ‘positive proof’) or superior rationality.
For example, one presupposition dominating the contemporary world is the belief that continual economic growth is both possible and
necessary for global prosperity, even though, as Obrecht shows, this belief is leading directly to increasing inequality and the utter destruc-tion of life on our planet.3 An awareness of the massive challenges facing the world encourages the search for some different general pre-suppositions about what ‘good development’ means.
Western hegemony overlooks a basic insight from the foundations of the sociology of science – that a sound conceptual analysis should provide for the (re)construction of data (Koch and Weingart 2016: 40).
Therefore, if the general presuppositions we carry with us influence how we theorise, the categories we use, the models we construct, and how we interpret evidence from the real world, we must, as Adriansen et al. (2016) suggest, consider these in self-reflexive ways. The word
‘influence’ is crucial here, since presuppositions do not necessarily determine all other levels of the scientific continuum. In other words, Norhed-type projects can work even if the researchers and professors have very different worldviews. We can discuss different, even conflict-ing, presuppositions about what constitutes good empirical evidence or good analytical models, and still find agreement about one or more of these relatively autonomous aspects of research. What is crucial to note, however, is that it is through these kinds of theoretical discus-sions and even confrontations that we can make our presuppositions explicit. By opening our assumptions up for scrutiny, we also open ourselves to new understandings of how theories are shaped in differ-ent contexts, and of how we can read reality together and still generalise very differently. As Alexander (1982: 35) notes:
Science proceeds as surely by generalizing or ‘theoretical logic’
as it does by the empirical logic of experiment, and the positivist decision to focus on the latter alone must ultimately prove as self-defeating as reading one side of a double column of figures.
This challenge may not yet have been taken seriously enough by pro-grammes like Norhed. To observe and reflect on how general presuppositions and empirical observations differ when researchers from widely different cultures meet will place extra demands on how joint projects are developed. In a paper titled, ‘Negotiating scientific
knowledge about climate change: Enhancing research capacity through PhD students’, Lene Madsen and Thomas Nielsen (2016) try to show how much social science is still based on Western ethnocentric assump-tions, conducting research through ‘imperial eyes’, and seeing Western theories as universally applicable, thus blocking the reflection neces-sary for opening up the debate around presuppositions. To counter this, Madsen and Nielsen take their lead from feminist studies, arguing that ‘we as authors need to outline and engage in positionality’ (2016:
148). Their general idea is that to reveal the complexity of research relations, it is necessary to address insider relationships explicitly.
Following Edward Said (1978, 1994), who noted how the hegemony of Western epistemology excludes others, Madsen and Nielsen show how
‘positioning’ can lead to mutual reflection within a theoretical/empiri-cal continuum.
However, when considering ‘orientalism’ as one aspect of Western hegemonic knowledge, Said praises Clifford Geertz’s ability to make his presuppositions explicit, enabling others to see and understand his empirical approach while being sensitive to cultural variation in his analysis. Said’s main point seems to be that if we are aware of how general presuppositions work on other levels of the knowledge-creation process, we may be able to communicate about knowledge that is good and true across contexts and cultures. If this is so, it should be possible to make this knowledge available to co-operating partners within, for example, Norhed’s cross-national projects.
When we try to learn from Norhed’s many projects, as the contribu-tors to this book have, the degree of mutual reflection on these possibly different presuppositions becomes important to detect. In fact, a focus on the relationship between theoretical logics becomes a precondition for communication. As a result, we can argue that colonisation of the mind by Western hegemonic ways of thinking can be changed, not by blocking off the West, but by taking the time to clarify how often the-ory drives observation while also hiding the general presuppositions that make the theory valid only for the context in which it was produced rather than, as is often claimed, at a general level.
The fact that Norhed is theory driven – with project applications evaluated academically by peer review – is a good start. That is, both
the project leaders and the Norhed evaluators acknowledge that differ-ent presuppositions can lead to very differdiffer-ent ways of evaluating what kinds of knowledge can be considered good and relevant. This includes being sensitive to the histories of particular disciplines. There are many ways of telling the truth and Norhed-supported research, in par-ticular, is likely to encounter problems with cross-disciplinary boundaries as we know them today, given that perhaps as many as 6 000 different disciplines exist across universities worldwide.