Tor Halvorsen is a senior researcher at the University of Bergen Global and SDG Bergen, as well as at the Fafo Institute for Labour and Social Research, Oslo. He can be contacted via e-mail at Tor.Halvorsen@uib.no
Kirsten Skare Orgaret is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. She can be contacted at kristo@oslomet.no
Roy Krøvel is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. He can be contacted at royk@oslomet.no
Notes
1 Disciplinary power over knowledge is part of what makes both interdisciplinarity and the building of disciplines that run counter to the hegemonic centre such an uphill battle; see the Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity, edited by Robert Frodeman (2017), particularly the chapter by Thomas Köning and Michael E Gorman titled, ‘The challenge of funding interdisciplinary research: A look inside public research funding agencies’ (513–524).
2 Alexander defines the components of this scientific continuum as including: gener-al presuppositions, models, concepts, definitions, classifications, laws, complex and simple propositions, correlations, methodological assumptions, and observations.
3 Hans Rosling is one example of an academic who took this approach. If we agree that facts are what we strive to present, Rosling delivers statistics to show that
health and general well-being of human beings in the contemporary era are general-ly better than they were in the past (Rosling et al. 2018). From within this paradigm, Western knowledge and the capitalist division of labour are seen as having driven this general upswing in human progress. These are then used to validate Western knowledge and labour practices, as well as the model of infinite economic growth being both possible and essential. As Rosling et al. (2018: 220) put it: ‘Let’s be real-istic about what the five billion people in the world who still wash their clothes by hand are hoping for and what they will do everything they can to achieve. Expecting them to voluntarily slow down their economic growth is absolutely unrealistic. They want washing machines, electric lights, decent sewage systems, a fridge to store food, glasses if they have poor eyesight, insulin if they have diabetes, and transport to go on vacation just as much as you and I do.’
4 As Victor R Baker (2017: 88) observes, ‘scientific careers increasingly depend on positive outcomes from peer reviews of grant applications and successful editorial decisions on manuscript submissions to highly cited journals. Judgements by pro-motion committees, department heads, and deans depend on standards developed within established disciplines. Spreading one’s professional activities across multi-ple disciplines leaves one open to charges of doing science that is “soft”, “lacking in depth and/or rigor” or “spread too thin” and thereby deficient in demonstrating the scholarship expected for accountability standards of accomplishment and expertise.
Thus, the young scholars who stray from disciplinary standards risk being perceived by colleagues as engaging in mere “dilettantism”, that is, treating important matters of science in an amateurish manner.’
5 Mbembe’s literary skill captures this better than many social scientists do (many of us have lost language through years of one-sided discipline-based training). He writes: ‘It is therefore humanity as a whole that gives the world its name. In confer-ring its name on the world, it delegates to it and receives from it confirmation of its own position, singular yet fragile, vulnerable and partial, at least in relation to the other forces of the universe – animals and vegetables, objects, molecules, divinities, techniques and raw material, the earth trembling, volcanoes erupting, winds and storms, rising waters, the sun that explodes and burns, and all the rest of it. There is therefore no world except by naming, delegation, mutuality, and reciprocity’
(Mbembe 2017: 180).
6 As Turner (2017: 19) argues, ‘Each of the advantages of disciplinarity comes with limitations: the need to service students, the intellectual coercion that results from the disciplinary hierarchy that comes from the market exchange of students, the constraints on communication resulting from common training and norms, and the exclusion and limitations that go with them. Each limitation and exclusion produces an alternative unpopulated space, often involving practical problems, that’ belong’
to no discipline and cannot be easily addressed by any of them. The difficulties, however, are commensurate with the opportunities.’
7 As noted in the previous chapter, these are: education and training; health; natural resource management, climate change and environment; democratic and economic governance; the humanities, culture, media and communication; and a special ca-pacity development programme in South Sudan.
8 Pippa Norris was employed by the UNDP for many years and is now a professor at Harvard University and the University of Sydney. In her book Making Democratic Governance Work: How Regimes Shape Prosperity, Welfare, and Peace she explains that the World Bank’s policies that promote economic growth first, and promise that the market will democratise societies ‘in the long run’ create false ideas about how mar-kets work in society. She argues that, in fact, prioritising democratisation is better at creating peace, social welfare and prosperity. She then shows that the combina-tion of democracy with a well-funccombina-tioning state is what secures the kind of development that benefits the widest range of people in any population. Universities can contribute here by ensuring that states have a skilled workforce to recruit from (to counter donor experts, for example) and by operating according to democratic values in ways that equip the independent thinkers and academics that democracies and bureaucracies need.
9 Simon Marginson (2006) argues that since Thatcherism and public-choice theory as used by the World Bank (see Chapter 2 in this book), it is hard to say what ‘the pub-lic’ is when the global market rules.
10 To those who argue that Norway always goes for collaboration and has invariably supported Unesco’s work for the global public, a reminder is necessary: following US-led demands from the World Trade Organization for South Africa to open up its education sector for trade in educational services (as other African countries have been pressured to do), Norway was among partnering countries that placed pres-sure on South Africa. This was withdrawn only after Kader Asmal, then South Africa’s minister of education, visited Norway in October 2003 where he shamed Norway at an SIU conference for attempting to turn South Africa’s public higher education system into a marketplace that would quickly become dominated by the private sector (Halvorsen 2005).
11 To this critique it must be added that, at a policy level at least, Norway has been an exception to this way of working since 1986, when universities initiated this North–
South collaboration in the NUFU programme (see the previous chapter, this volume). In her overview of Norwegian aid policies, Randi Rønning Balsvik insists that NUFU actually favoured research that was prioritised in the South: ‘From its start, the programme was meant to favour research topics that came from the South, and often this was the case’ (2016: 141, my translation). As discussed in Chapter 1, however, capacity building related to this research was generally weak.
NUFU projects were of high quality but perhaps worked best to create free-floating intellectuals rather than institutionally embedded academics or institutions that were well equipped to conduct high-quality research. Eventually, the programme was moved to Norad, partly in an effort to remove bottlenecks linked to project administration; see also Skauge (2005).
12 In Alternativa fakta (2017), Åsa Wickforss notes how fast belief in academic knowl-edge is vanishing globally as knowlknowl-edge is increasingly perceived as relative. This is partly because of the influence of contemporary politics and partly because of how academics have responded to political influence.
13 In Rodney’s chapter titled, ‘Education for underdevelopment’, he writes: ‘The main purpose of the colonial school system was to train Africans to help man the local administration at the lowest ranks and to stall the private capitalist firms owned by Europeans. In effect, that meant selecting a few Africans to participate in the dom-ination and exploitation of the continent as a whole’ (1972: 292). Science and engineering seldom reached schools in Africa during the colonial era, and ever since, vast numbers of school pupils, in both Africa and Europe (until very recently) learned that the British discovered Mount Kenya and that Cecil Rhodes more or less created Africa.
14 Rebecca Solnit’s work on how even divided societies co-operate when faced with catastrophe is useful here. An insight into her thinking can be found in the inter-view with Solnit by Mark Karlin, Truthout, 29 January 2013. Available online.
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