methodologies, research topics, theories, language and the interpreta-tion of results all have the potential to express forms of dominainterpreta-tion.
Fourth, that the vicious cycle of academic domination that is linked to contemporary knowledge and power relations can be transformed through mutual learning. Fifth, that academic knowledge (often known as science) can be exchanged across cultures, in mutually useful and beneficial ways despite differences in language, perception, interests and modes of thinking.
Taken together, these five assumptions make the case that what we know can be established through joint research and shared as inter-sub-jectively established truths that are worthy of respect from the academic profession as a whole. The problematic term ‘truth’ is discussed further below. However, I acknowledge at the outset that ideas accepted as true in any time or place are often a compromise between text and context, and they are expressed via conventions that tend to make context ‘van-ish’ into text. For now, it is sufficient to note that without a strong belief in the validity of the five assumptions listed, the Norhed pro-gramme would be meaningless.
In what follows, this huge collaborative experiment is discussed in relation to: knowledge and power; space and place; epistemology and presuppositions; disciplines, decolonisation and/or neoliberalism;
internationalisation, knowledge and development, as well as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I conclude by briefly outlining the aim of this volume.
Knowledge and power
In framing the Norhed experiment, the most challenging issue for par-ticipants has been unpacking the relationship between knowledge and power. To help us reflect on this, a workshop was arranged (in March
2018) with academics from Germany and Denmark who have been part of similar experiments. At the workshop, we agreed that the complex interactions between knowledge and power can be analysed on many levels. These include: how knowledge shapes individuals and communi-ties; how knowledge justifies, influences and legitimises politics; how knowledge and education affect the social or class structure of a society;
and how knowledge is a productive force in any economy when it helps make organisations work effectively. The general consensus was that the power of knowledge is good for development, but not at all times and under any conditions. For example, where the ‘power of knowledge’
is too weak within an institution, the power of external experts deployed by donors and multilateral organisations can be overwhelming. It was therefore acknowledged that if Norhed is to deliver on its aim of empow-ering academics at the supported universities, the programme must succeed as both a social project and a knowledge project.
In their book, The Delusion of Knowledge Transfer, Koch and Weingart (2016) show how the sociologies of knowledge, power and politics are among the analytical tools needed to grasp how relations of knowledge and power shape societies. The sociology of knowledge reveals how knowledge is socially embedded in ways that shape its influence. This means that all professors are products of their time and place, and there is no such thing as neutral knowledge or a ‘technical’ expert.
Regardless of experts’ claims to objectivity, or agreement between scholars about what is true, no knowledge is the same in all contexts. In other words, the issues that influence the kinds of knowledge a society sees as ‘objective’ play a role in the knowledge that is seen as politically acceptable. There is thus a clear relationship between social power and forms of knowledge that pass as hegemonic truth.
In relation to state power, we have long talked about the co-produc-tion of knowledge and society (see Jasanoff 2004), and of how this co-production influences the resources that are mobilised for universi-ties, locally, regionally and globally. In their book, The Geography of Scientific Collaboration, Agnieszka Olechnicka et al. (2019) analyse the hegemonic centres of knowledge, revealing the remarkable stability of the West in this regard, and the recent rise of China (to the level of the US) in some of the so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology,
engineering and mathematics). Institutions located on the peripheries have their knowledge production assessed and valued by the hegemonic centres. Turning this around requires enormous effort. As Olechnicka et al. (2019: 177) put it:
Research collaboration cements the long-term, hierarchical, core–periphery structure of the global distribution of research excellence. Top-notch research organisations tend to collaborate with each other. In effect, they gain additional advantage over scientifically less developed entities. Collaboration between more and less scientifically advanced organisations, places, or countries happens very often. However, the effects of such co-operation are not necessarily evenly distributed among part-ners. Although less scientifically advanced partners benefit – through the diffusion of knowledge – from relations with more developed collaborators, the latter profit even more because they are able to impose their paradigms, research agen-das, and long-term objectives.
Norhed’s goal of contributing to building academic capacity in the South has the potential to challenge this global hegemonic social struc-ture. It also challenges the alliance between knowledge and power in cross-border academic collaborations that are constantly drawn into reproducing Western hegemony. However, for the Norhed experiment to succeed, it must be organised in ways that neutralise the sociological power of the West’s influence over knowledge without blocking access to its academic centres (Koch and Weingart 2016).
In addition, the Norhed experiment has to secure enough support from society and the political sphere to be able to develop as a force in society and within politics. The disbursement of project funding to project leaders at universities in the South (who also determine pro-jects’ research agendas), is one strategy (and perhaps a precondition) for starting to transform this ‘geography of inequality’. However, the sociology and political governance of knowledge make it clear that more is needed. If projects are to be embedded in the South (as Norad proposes), it is necessary to accept that they may also challenge
established ideas about excellence and quality as determined by the hierarchies embedded in international journals, university ranking systems, citation indexes, big data, and ‘big science’.
Norhed’s basic principle is to hand over to the South, not only the power to determine and manage its own research agenda and capaci-ty-building projects, but epistemological hegemony as well. This kind of collaboration requires us to be open to new understandings of our disciplines, new ways of working between disciplines, and even to the argument that the whole notion of disciplines, as developed in the West, creates ‘black holes’ that require some rethinking.1 As discussed later in this chapter, disciplines are defined by social conventions that tend to resist being challenged by new contexts and experiences.
Disciplines are not defined by theory, methodology, or a particular topic or object of study; they are the product of a socially guided ‘disci-plinary’ process that help shape knowledge and power. It takes time to discover that even when disciplines seem similar in name and facul-ty-base, they can be perceived quite differently from region to region.
Those entrenched in the STEM disciplines of the hegemonic North can find it challenging to learn about and engage with alternative ways of constructing knowledge, especially when this calls into question estab-lished knowledge–power relations. Likewise, because scholars are trained to look to the academic centres for confirmation of their rele-vance within their disciplines, it can be challenging to participate in developing new knowledge when academics from the periphery have the power to define what knowledge is relevant.
In other words, ‘ownership’ of research projects has to shift, but so do attitudes towards the South, along with concerns about all the
‘losses’ this may involve in terms of time, productivity, publishing opportunities, as reputation, status and ‘academic legitimacy’, if estab-lished disciplinary practices are not followed to the letter. Of course, this also entails challenging how projects are expected to report on their status and progress. Currently, reporting rules are among the tools that Western institutions use to entrench their position at the centre of academic innovation and scholarly networks. Norhed will succeed only if academics in the South are empowered, and if Norad’s reporting requirements both presuppose, and allow for, some
adjustments to what are considered acceptable forms and avenues of academic production. Without this, every Norhed project will feel the effects of the potential contradiction between Norad’s power and Norhed’s intentions.
The Norhed experiment is about creating equal partnerships, in the sense that researchers and academics from Norway, Nepal, Uganda, or any other co-operating countries, will find ways of agreeing on what is good, true, and relevant knowledge for the projects they are involved in. Thus, Norhed believes in the possibility of creating a ‘power-free’
space – where intellectual curiosity rules, collaborative work is carried out and academic spaces flourish through links with a partner or part-ners in Norway.
It is important here not to conflate places and spaces of co-operation.
We see the universities, where funded research projects are located, as places of co-operation. As is evident from most of the chapters in this book, many of these are relatively weak institutionally. Transforming this reality is not a question of capacity building only (although this is Norhed’s main raison d’être) but also of advancing the social strength of the academic profession more generally. Accordingly, we define the co-operation between the researchers and the many networks they are involved in as spaces of co-operation. Here, the academic resources drawn on and developed in project work can lead to the empowerment neces-sary for ‘equal partnerships’ to germinate and flourish. Of course, how spaces and places relate to one another is a big issue, but that they do is crucial if participants in the different projects are going to be able to turn away from ‘feeding the centres’ and focus instead on forming new knowl-edge nodes that are strong enough to draw from the research, teaching resources and energies of the centre and apply them on their own terms.
The establishment of Norhed reveals an optimism that is rare in our world. Debates about decolonising the universities seem to suggest that such co-operation inevitably reproduces the power relations that suit the North, both socially and epistemologically. Yet, at the March 2018 workshop referred to earlier, a group of Danish and African authors showed how ‘place and space’ can be linked in ways that counter Western hegemony. Similarly, in their book, Higher Education and Capacity Building in Africa: The Geography and Power of Knowledge Under Changing
Conditions, Adriansen et al. take as their point of departure the concept that ‘knowledge production is one of the major sites in which imperial-ism operates’. Dedicating their book to the ‘de-imperialisation of knowledge’, they ask (as do I), how capacity-building projects at univer-sities in Africa affect their knowledge production (2016: 32, 1).
The impression created in this book, and from input at the work-shop, is that this group of authors found it difficult to collaborate on equal grounds just by changing attitudes and transferring deci-sion-making powers over projects to the South. They argue that epistemology itself is so Westernised that new epistemologies will have to be built from other places of knowledge, and from those places, new spaces (where the research or renewing of knowledge goes on) will begin to create and promote new theories of knowledge. So-called indigenous knowledge counts as one point of departure here, but how indigenous knowledge can be transformed into academic knowledge in ways that challenge the academic centre is seldom debated. Yet, as Adriansen et al. (2016: 210) suggest, common ground for co-operation is the space of knowledge production into which ‘Northern partners’ must enter with a ‘reflexive mind’.
Norhed’s optimism makes the programme more open to how space and place relate to one another within common and potentially new epistemologies (as defined via project applications) despite huge differ-ences in the power, social context and status accorded to knowledge production (via research and innovation) as well as reproduction (teaching). This is expressed via programme documents that reference, for example, human rights, the value of gender equality, the idea that the spread of knowledge might involve translating established hegem-onic knowledge in ways that make sense in local conditions, thus enabling research partners to learn from each other without having to become like one another. This process of translation is crucial for pre-serving and respecting cultural perceptions and traditions with which local knowledge is so inextricably entangled, and is perhaps the most important reason why capacity building for independent research is so worthy of support. For Norhed, such translation is a prerequisite for independent knowledge development, and the building of independent academic cultures is a long-term project. Collaboration on equal terms
requires a shift in power relations and a deep awareness of the sociol-ogy of knowledge, but neither of these presuppose a shift to an epistemology based solely on indigenous knowledge. The process of translation will always count. That’s why building relations between Northern and Southern partners remains a fundamental principle in Norhed’s overall strategy.
I now explore some of the issues raised above in relation to knowl-edge and power in a little more detail.