Re‐making the global economy of knowledge: do new fields of research change the structure of North–South relations?

Abstract

How is global-North predominance in the making of organized knowledge affected by the rise of new domains of research? This question is examined empirically in three interdisciplinary areas - climate change, HIV-AIDS, and gender studies - through interviews with 70 researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. The study found that the centrality of the North was reinstituted as these domains came into existence, through resource inequalities, workforce mechanisms, and intellectual framing. Yet there are tensions in the global economy of knowledge, around workforce formation, hierarchies of disciplines, neoliberal management strategies, and mismatches with social need. Intellectual workers in the Southern tier have built significant research centres, workforces and some distinctive knowledge projects. These create wider possibilities of change in the global structure of organized knowledge production.

Multilateralism as a ‘site’ of struggle over environmental knowledge: the North-South divide

“…In order to understand knowledge struggles observed through CEE, we need to acknowledge historically rooted inequalities between the Global North and the Global South in producing, legitimizing, and authorizing scientific knowledge; these include imbalances in global institutional hierarchies and resources (Connell et al 2018). The North-South divide inevitably determines the place of scientific knowledge in the twentyfirst century, most notably because there is no way we can disconnect the current world and knowledge orders from our colonial past (Smith Tuhiwai 2012; De Sousa Santos 2014).…”

World librarians: A socio-technical system providing library search services to offline schools and libraries in Malawi

“…Component 1 is critical toward moving toward ICT and informational capacity power parity. Returning back to the Global North/South discussion in Section 2 , Connell, Pearse, Collyer, Maia, and Morrell (2018: 738) state that intellectual workers from the Global South are challenging the status quo of the “global structure of organized knowledge production” (p. 738) by collaborating with other Global South partners to build research centers and distinct knowledge projects. This would be the ideal situation for WL growth and expansion.…”

Climate change in sociology: Still silent or resonating?

“…Five studies analyse the global flows of knowledge and people in the context of climate change. They demonstrate how climate change becomes manifest in the form of environmentally-related migration (Hunter et al, 2015), international collaborations of researchers in low carbon innovation (Tyfield and Urry, 2009), unequal flows of knowledge between the Global North and South (Connell et al, 2018a(Connell et al, , 2018b, and global civil society networks (Ylä-Anttila and Swarnakar, 2017). Three of the contributions draw upon mixed methods research, while one contribution employs qualitative research and one contribution is a review paper.…”

“…The majority of contributions in this subfield explore knowledge flows in the global research domain. Connell et al study inequalities in scientific knowledge production between the Global North and South in three fields of research: climate change, HIV/ AIDS and gender (Connell et al, 2018a(Connell et al, , 2018b. They report prevailing inequalities in the 'global knowledge economy dominated by the most privileged countries, institutions, and social groups, increasingly gripped by the corporate pursuit of profit' (Connell et al, 2018a: 754).…”