Marina Blagojević

Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery

A Gender Perspective

Belgrade

2009

Chapter 2

Creators, Transmitters and Users: Women’s Scientific Excellence at the

Semiperiphery of Europe16

“...epistemology and philosophy of science would always be recognized to have political dimensions. They have political origins, processes and consequences since who does and who does not gain the access to defining, making, legitimating, and deploying a culture’s knowledge systems is a political matter. Power including gender advantages, is accumulated, deployed, and distributed through epistemological and philosophic processes.” (Harding, 1998: 120)

“An excellent student of mine from Central European University, Budapest, who obtained an award for her MA thesis, as the best MA thesis in Hungary in 2002, wanted to publish an article in one Western scientific journal based on her thesis. Her paper was returned with clear demands to supply her research findings with some Western theoretical framework. She decided to comply, but the research findings, of course stayed the same, demonstrating that Western theories simply were irrelevant. She sent the article again, and this time they refused to publish it with the explanation that if it does not confirm or reject Western theories, it is simply not important enough to be published”. (Source: personal testimony MB)

16 Shorter version of this text has been published under the same title in: Gender and Excellence in the Making, European Commission, Directorate-General for Research, Luxemburg, 2004

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Four Theoretical Assumptions

This paper will explore the field of interconnectedness between knowledge production, the semiperiphery17, gender and “scientific excellence”, which is largely an under-theorized and under-researched field of “absence of knowledge”. It will be tackled with a combination of theoretical ideas, research findings, personal observations and concrete examples, including valuable insights gained from the work process that I developed through my participation in the ENWISE18 Expert Group set up in October 2002 by the European Commission to report on the situation facing women scientists in the Central and Eastern European countries and in the Baltic States. The focus of this paper is on social sciences and especially gender studies at the semiperiphery19 for two reasons. The first is theoretical: social sciences are extremely context sensitive sciences, and gender studies development, specifically, at the semiperiphery encompasses many of the problems which reveal the tensions between gender, creation of new knowledge and “excellence”. The second reason is practical: my personal experiences relate to those fields.

Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery

The starting assumption is that the concept of “the semiperiphery” is exceptionally useful for the understanding of the dynamism of knowledge production, rewards and dissemination of knowledge,

17 Semiperiphery in this paper refers to postcommunist European societies, in different stages of Enlargement process. 18 ENWISE: Enlarge Women In Science to East 19 Therefore, in this paper when reference it made to the scientists from the semiperiphery, it is taken to mean scientists from social sciences.

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within the larger context of globalisation.20 What makes the concept of “the semiperiphery” a useful epistemological tool is that it reveals the dynamics quite specific to both core and periphery. Transitional countries at the semiperiphery of Europe, former communist countries which are in different stages of the process of Enlargement, although in many ways different between themselves, are also very deeply embedded in their semiperipheral position of the global market and global knowledge production. New global developments re-define the contradictory position of the semiperiphery in the world system, and relevant distinction as Arrighi (1985) suggests is not the one between the production of industrial versus primary goods, but between “intellectual” activities (i.e. those that involve strategic decision-making, control and administration, R&D, etc.) and executive activities. Accordingly, knowledge production at the core is accompanied by supplementary activities at the semiperiphery.

The major characteristics of semiperipheral societies in regard to the global knowledge market are the following: 1. they intensively export the “knowers”, those who are already established or potential “knowers” (brain-drain), which constantly weaken the position of those societies in the global knowledge market as well as their capacity for self-reflection through scientific research and, accordingly, to effective movement towards the center; 2. they are experiencing important shifts in scientific developments (ENWISE report, 2003) which largely re-shape local knowledge hierarchies and the position of local knowledge institutions in respective social contexts, often

20 It is important to note that the concept of semiperiphery in this text plays a different starting point to the one it would have in the case of Joseph Ben-David”s conception (Ben-David, 1971) of the science centre and the science periphery. The emphasis here is on distinctive features of semiperiphery which present a different epistemological challenge, invisible from the dichotomy centre-periphery, and which could be very relevant especially for social sciences. However, on another level, this theory is very well applicable to the countries in the semiperiphery of Europe, as shown in ENWISE report (2003), second chapter.

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marginalizing them; and 3. their knowledge production is often, at the centre, interpreted in terms of a “cold war” paradigm, meaning that it has inscribed inferiority, irrelevance, or simply low value, or even validity, limited to local communities.

In other words, knowledge which is being made at the semiperiphery is in the global knowledge market something like “semi-knowledge” never “quite there”, as the semi- periphery itself. That knowledge is seen per defintionem as partial, limited, and often as not “objective” enough, it is mainly reduced to “evidence without theory”, to some register of “exemplary” or “extreme” cases. Knowledge produced at the semiperiphery about the semiperiphery usually functions only as “background” or “back up” for generalizations produced by the center and for the sake of the centre which retains an ambition to create “universally valid” knowledge. That kind of knowledge, “universally valid” knowledge, is a necessary condition, more political than cognitive, for the socio-economic-political engineering of the contemporary globalisation process, and for the re-production of the semiperiphery itself.

Social, economic and political engineering to which the semiperiphery is exposed is performed on two levels: on the structural level and on the discoursive level, where symbolic capital of the core dominates. This is also happening in science and social science in particular. One of the major consequences of this parallel intervention is that between the structural realities of the semiperiphery and their discoursive realities, especially scientific discourses addressing those realities, exists a gap.

Imported and often imposed concepts, such as “multiculturalism”, “human rights”, “identity politics” and other key concepts for the political process of globalisation, exercised through a number of different international institutions and translated into the realities of semiperipheral societies by local NGOs heavily dependent

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on exterior funds, create quite unique discoursive environment for scientific production of social sciences. A new kind of “political correctness”, instead of communist political correctness, in tune with the process of economic globalisation, establishes the discoursive framework for social sciences of transitional societies. (Salecel: 1994)

Semiperipheral societies are very diachronic societies, often perceived as societies with slowed down, or an impeded process of “modernisation”. However, they are often assumed to be “slow” but immanently similar, not different, which is not the case with the Third world countries. Both core and the semiperiphery represented by scientific elites have interests in retaining meta-narrative on modernisation and different speeds of modernisation, without really investigating the dynamics of the relationship between core and the semiperiphery. With the collapse of communism, the process of European Enlargement and increasing ambitions of semiperipheral societies to become part of the “promised land”, discourse on modernisation, or lack of it, perfectly corresponds to the prospects of European integration, being a kind of “moving target”. So where ever the process of Enlargement is slowed down, it is due to the lack of “modernisation”.

The prevailing absence of the scientific discourse on the relationship between centre and the semiperiphery including the role of “transition” in the overall globalisation process, nevertheless, has its negative consequences: transitional countries have paid extraordinary high human costs for social change. Many ill-designed measures with disastrous effects could have been prevented or diminished, if the knowledge which already existed at the semiperiphery and the “knowers” had been taken seriously. As only recently, after a decade of “transition”, observed by Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner:

“Some of our problems abroad were caused by how we interacted with other countries, especially weaker developing

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nations. Acting as if we had come up with a unique, guaranteed formula for prosperity, we - sometimes with the assistance of other advanced industrial countries - bullied other nations into doing things our way. Both through our own economic diplomacy and through the influence of the American dominated International Monetary Fund, Uncle Sam became Dr. Sam, dispensing prescriptions to the rest of the world: cut the budget, lower that trade barrier, and privatize that utility. Like some physicians we were too busy, and too sure of ourselves - to listen to our patients with their ideas. Too busy sometimes even to look at the individual countries and their circumstances. The economists and development experts of the Third World, many of them brilliant and highly educated, were sometimes treated like children”. (Stiglitz, 2003: 23)

Arrogant “prescriptive” behavior of core institutions, imposed speed of change, counterproductive policy measures, or even counterproductive political and military interventions, which is most evident in the most drastic cases of ethnic conflicts, but also in much of the policy making in general, increased the costs of “transition”, contrary to political and economic interests of the majority of the population at the semiperiphery. At the same time, “transitology”, as a scientific field dealing with the process of “transition” from communism to postcommunism, became one of the fastest growing fields of social sciences, without really affecting social change in positive terms. So, this paradox is the framework for investigating the phenomena of “scientific excellence” in social sciences at the semiperiphery as well as the validity of imported paradigms from the scientific centre.

Another paradox of knowledge production at the semiperiphery is questioning the problem of “excellence” as well. In Third world countries the discrepancy between scientific discourses and social realities of those countries was exposed to much of the criticism of post-colonial theories. However, there are few efforts of a similar

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kind related to the semiperiphery (Todorova:1997; Goldsworthy: 1998; Bijelić, Savić: 2002) The process of critical examination of the centre’s theoretical paradigms dealing with the semiperiphery is impeded for two reasons: political and epistemological.

The political reason could be described as “desire for the West” together with strong anti-communism, phenomena which shape much of the political atmosphere in most of the semiperipheral countries, and create a discoursive environment which is too unfavorable to allow for a critical stand on “transition”. Epistemological reason, on the other hand, is related to the lack of possibility to make research on peripheral societies independent of the centre’s agenda, expressed in dependency for funding in conditions of limited local resources, or, further, impossibility to create epistemic communities at the semiperiphery independent from the centre’s mediation which is often a knowledge distortion as well.

The paradox could be expressed in the following way: societies at the semiperiphery are not different enough, to be recognized as different (being former industrialized societies). Moreover, there is no genuine political interest, neither in the center nor at the semiperiphery for these differences to be acknowledged and researched. Instead, a shortcut is advocated: promotion of policy measures which should help those societies to “adjust” to the center. The result is often, formalized and formal adjustment, full of traps of counterproductive effects. While on the formal level, these societies comply with the demands of the center, on the societal level there are evident processes of de-development, resistance, chaos, entropy or anomy (Heinrich, 1999). What concept will be used to describe this condition is a matter of theoretical approach, but the fact is that “transition” being part of globalisation process is producing very different effects for different segments of semiperipheral societies, often enlarging differences between semiperipheral societies

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themselves, and increasing an overall uncertainty about the future direction of societal change, on the sate level, as well as on the global level. The cost of “globalized” ignorance is global uncertainty.

How does all of this affect “scientific excellence” at the semiperiphery? If scientific excellence in its abstract meaning is related to originality, innovativeness, creativity, but also to ethical principal of value for humanity, then it seems that these qualities could hardly be attributed to social scientists of the semiperiphery to a large extent. They do not formulate new paradigms, nor do they have possibilities to communicate them to wider epistemic communities at the semi –periphery, neither have they profoundly contributed to the critique of high costs of “transition”, in fact “globalisation” of their societies.

In other words, “excellence” in the conditions of the 1990s and even today, could be seen as a highly contradictory individual project, which demands a clear choice which a scientist at the semiperiphery needs to make between “being excellent” as regards the standards of the centre - which often implies acceptance of the dominant paradigms, accompanied with “political correctness” and often withdrawal from the critical thinking, - or to make a choice in favor of critical thinking, possibly useful and usable for the local epistemic community, driven by personal ethical standards, but to remain isolated and to function in small marginal networks incapable of creating new paradigms, lacking resources and power. Another possibility is also open, which in reality is often combined by one of the two previously mentioned, and which in fact enables economic survival for the scientists at the semiperiphery: to produce a kind of supplementary knowledge about the semiperiphery, but within the theoretical framework provided by the center. Social scientists from the semiperiphery are often perceived and used as suppliers of the more or less “raw” material which needs to be theorized from the centre, to be generalised, neutralised,

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objectified, through the mediation of core institutions, and thus to become – “scientific”. This knowledge is produced within the coordinates determined by the knowledge institutions of the centre, often accompanied with many distortions.

“Big Science is where the big money is in the West these days, particularly for studies in comparative social and political research where identical surveys are carried out in each of a number of countries to enable cross-country comparisons of public attitudes using the same models regardless of the specificities of the country. Western researchers, often not able to function in the languages of the countries that they are studying and often trying to study a half dozen or more countries at once, must rely on “local” researchers to ensure that the research is being carried out according to Western standards and with Western research methods by people who know what the main researcher wants. The local researcher, then, becomes a research assistant – managing only a part of the project without the access to the whole. It is more important that she or he be fluent in English and can act as bridge between two worlds than that she or he is capable of carrying out the research as principal investigator. In other words, the Western researcher needs someone who can bring back data as if it never originated in another culture and another language, and in a system with different sorts of research obstacles. If the local researcher does it well, the Western researcher can ignore that there have ever been problems of cultural translation. (...) And since the problems of cultural translation are no longer apparent in the data, it seems that the local researcher is not really necessary to understanding the data collected by the project by the time the major analysis is done.” (Kim Lane Scheppele, in Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele,1996: 117)

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Standpoint Epistemology at the Semiperiphery

What is essential from the epistemological point of view is that the semiperiphery is not some unimportant residual category, but that semiperipheral position creates deep needs for very different knowledge paradigms.

“Figuratively speaking Central Europe had been almost Western ever since the middle Ages and became almost Eastern after the second war. Squeezed in between two threatening and socio-politically very different regions, it has always been forced to understand both in order to survive.”(Wessely, 1996: 17)

The essence of the semiperiphery is its instability because it is open to two different possibilities at the same time: to catch up with the centre, or to be pushed further into the periphery. The major characteristics of the semiperiphery, which is caught up in a vicious circle of “being different, but not being different enough” reflects in fact structural dispositions of the semiperiphery, which is “transiting” between structures, in the condition which is more often structurless than structured, more often in dynamism than in stability. Ambivalences, paradoxes, discontinuities, unintended detrimental consequences, chaos, entropy, are only some of the records of such “in-betweness”. In other words, change at the semiperiphery is as much structural, as structure itself. Economic and political forces in semiperipheral societies have in many ways different dynamism than is the case with core countries. The lack of structurally based determinism which comes out as a consequence of structural void is reflected in “epistemic void” (Iveković, 1993). So, the epistemic consequences are simply large. This is what is certainly validating a need for specific paradigms, coming from the semiperiphery itself. In other words, it would be unreasonable to claim that knowledge created at the centre

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could “cover” the realities at the semiperiphery. This starting point challenges the issue of “excellence” from another perspective: namely, what could be recognised as “excellence” by the centre and from the centre, could be more or less irrelevant, even distorting knowledge for the semiperiphery, and vice versa. Many of the structural changes in the globalisation process could not be understood from the semiperiphery itself, which inclines to overemphasize “small differences” and overlook wider, more general global trends of social change. In a way, standpoint epistemology should be advocated both for the core and for the semiperiphery, or periphery. However, the precondition for the cognitive leap is not in summarizing different “standpoints”, but in creating deeper understanding of why and how different ways of knowing and different knowledges are shaped by those standpoints.

Or to go one step further, as it is useful for understanding the globalisation of production and its implications by the use of the concept of “commodity chains,” which refers to the network of labor and production processes necessary to produce a finished commodity, a parallel concept could be constructed such as “knowledge chains”, which would imply different, but interconnected roles of knowledge institutions and knowledge networks along the continuum core - the semiperiphery - periphery. At present, damagingly for the essence of scientific excellence, different locations on this continuum largely determine what could possibly be given the attribute of “excellence”, what could be possibly recognized as “excellent”, and by whom. “Excellence” in science thus appears to be very context dependent, but within the powerful configuration of the continuum core - the semiperiphery – periphery, which is clearly counterproductive for the real “scientific excellence” and which is decreasing the overall possibility of humanity to govern itself in a productive and efficient way.

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Because of the major epistemological consequences emerging from the very location of the semiperiphery, the second starting assumption in this paper is that standpoint epistemology is actually the only heuristically fruitful position for the social scientist at the semiperiphery. Being a social scientist at the semiperiphery during the transitional period offers the opportunity to be in a unique social laboratory. Observation, political commitment for change, creative thinking, all can be intertwined in extremely new and creative approaches. Social change itself is creating the possibilities for the change of paradigms.

However, from the level of individual insights and valuable contributions, to the level of well accepted paradigms and, accordingly, recognized “excellence” there is a gap, which can be bridged up only by communication in epistemic communities. No challenge of dominant theoretical and conceptual frameworks is possible as a purely individual act. But, also, every individual insight is deeply embedded in the shared cultural, contextual understanding of the social change. Problem of the recognition of “excellence” here comes both from the inside, local epistemic communities, as well from the outside, larger globalized epistemic communities. From the inside excellence may not be recognized because it operates within a well established cultural consensus (Nobody is prophet in his/her village.), therefore, the specific creative contribution may not be visible, because it is not estranged enough. On the other hand, excellence may not be recognised from the outside because it can easily fail to adequately translate contextual, cultural background into the dominant paradigms. The complexity of the local context often demands sophisticated multidimensional analysis which from the perspective of the centre usually seems to be irrelevant or too complicated.

There is a recurring tendency of the centre to repeatedly see and interpret local, contextual configurations as “déjà vu” phenomena, in the

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“normal” process of “modernisation”. Thus the essence is obscured: the semiperiphery is being produced and reproduced by the centre, which is an immanently different situation. Standpoint epistemology, although the only heuristically fruitful position of the social scientists at the semiperiphery, bears a high risk of producing both marginal knowledge and marginality of scientists, especially in the conditions of the absence of wider epistemic communities at the semiperiphery, capable of creating an adequate context for scientific evaluation.

Mechanisms of Exclusions

The third assumption is that between globalized knowledge production mainly shaped by the centre, which creates coordinates for both “scientific knowledge” and “scientific excellence” at the semiperiphery, which in fact influences conditions of the knowledge production at the semiperiphery, on one hand, and the individual women scientists from that very the semiperiphery, on the other hand, there exists a system of “translations”, mechanisms through which and by which her position, her way of knowing, her production of knowledge, and possible recognition of her “excellence” are connected. The link global - individual, which cuts through the semiperiphery, different statehoods, different local knowledge institutions, local gender regimes, cultural traditions, symbolic orders, and group experiences, even different histories of resistance, at the end largely shapes her possibilities to produce “excellent” knowledge, or the knowledge which will be recognized as such, regardless of her personal talents, capacities even productivity. In other words, there are many structural barriers to the recognition of scientific excellence for an individual woman scientist.

Gender bias in measuring scientific excellence is in many ways only secondary to the hierarchy in the evaluation of the knowledge coming

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from the location of the scientists on core-the semiperiphery – periphery continuum of knowledge production. As succinctly stated by one woman scientist in Serbia during research conducted in 1989: “It is much more important where you are born, than whether you are male or female” (Blagojević 1991). As explained by Andre Gudner Frank:

“The observation that the absolute and relative welfare of people, 'societies', 'economies', countries, etc. is derived NOT only, or even not primarily, from what they [can] do, nor even less from any 'characteristics' or 'things' that would permit them TO DO. Rather welfare and the benefits and DISbenefits derived from participation in a wider global whole is determined primarily by RELATIONS among people and within and among 'societies' and their PLACE or LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION in the whole system. THAT is what we need to study in the SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, which is greater than the sum of its parts and which shapes the relations among the parts and the parts themselves. And it is changes in location, more than in any innate or even acquired capacities, that determines the welfare or lack of it of any part.” (Andre Gudner Frank, Source:

http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/research.html

Gender Regimes at the Semiperiphery

Finally, the fourth assumption for this paper, which connects the concept of the semiperiphery and the concept of gender, relates to the specificity of gender regimes at the semiperiphery. Because the semiperiphery is continuously shaped by an on- going effort to “catch up” with the centre, women’s human resources are often additionally mobilised and exploited for the gap between the centre and the semiperiphery to be bridged. The semiperiphery regularly produces a paradoxical combination of strong patriarchies which exhaust woman’s resources in the private domain, together with ideological

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“fog” of gender equality. The result is, from a Western point of view, a strange amalgam of “super woman”, and a strong, sacrificial woman, who is “more than equal”. This is very similar, but not identical, to the “development” of the Third world countries, where intensive exploitation of women’s resources has been the precondition for the “modernisation” of those societies (Harding, 1998:105-23). In comparison to the Third world countries, in semiperipheral societies the use of women’s resources does not differ so much by the extent but by the quality: former industrialized societies with a strong egalitarian ideology created educated woman power with a high inclination for employment. Women’s relatively high inclusion in science, and fast feminisation of academic posts (ENWISE report, 2003), therefore is the consequence of the set of two very opposing sets of conditions: those favorable to women as part of a communist legacy (education, employment, egalitarian ideology) as well those unfavorable for women (“normalised” high level of exploitation of women’s resources as a precondition for the “development”, or “transition”, and very unfavorable position of science in general) (Blagojević: 1991; ENWISE report, 2003). In other words, without the wider context of the habitually high exploitation of women’s resources and cultural patterns which support this, it is impossible to understand women’s self/sacrificial behavior, both in private and in the public domain. Scientific excellence of women in this kind of environment, of prescribed women’s sacrifice, where women’s individual ambition is treated as ultimately negative, an “unwomanly” feature, something which is an excess, more than desirable quality. However, in that same environment women’s valuable resources could be quite efficiently used without adequate recognition, often even without any expectations for recognition coming even from women themselves.

These four assumptions underlie the major ideas of this text. They also shape the focus: women scientists in social sciences and especially in gender studies. It seems that in the position of those

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women scientists multiple paradoxes of their scientific existence at the semiperiphery accumulate and combine, and therefore they represent a kind of ideal “sample” for investigating the connection between knowledge production at the semiperiphery, gender and recognition of excellence21.

Doing Social Science at the Semiperiphery: Laboratory without Roof

Social scientists at the European semiperiphery where the process of “transition” took off in the late 1980s and is still continuing for some countries, at a different speed and in a different manner, have been faced with very many new challenges: extremely changed conditions and environment for their work. Here some of the problems will be discussed which underlie the difference in “doing social science” East and West, and which more or less directly influence both the “scientific excellence” and what could be eventually recognized as such.

NGO scenes in post communist societies is yet another interesting phenomena, affecting research in social sciences in semiperipheral societies, in many ways incomparable to core countries. One of the major differences is the fact that many of the NGOs are heavily dependent on external funding. As they were targeted by different international and foreign agents as the major “enzyme” for fostering social change in postcommunist societies, towards “democratization and market economy”, they also encompassed much of the actual on-

21 Throughout this paper a difference is being made between “scientific excellence” and recognition of “scientific excellence”. This is an important theoretical and methodological distinction, because there is always a kind of discrepancy between the two, and the major effort should be made to bring the two as close as possible. However, the conditions at the semiperiphery and the position of semiperiphery in fact widens the gap between the two.

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going research in semiperipheral societies, but with the clear agenda coming from the core. In more concrete terms, this means that throughout the 1990s and also today, social scientists from the semiperipheral countries of Europe were surviving and working in many ways under the regime of NGO scenes, not an academic regime. The implications are numerous: hyper production of low quality so called “policy researches”, ad hoc creation of “expertise” on different issues without any academic recognition, further marginalisation of academia in the public life of semiperipheral societies, unhealthy competition between academia and NGOs, creation of parallel educational programmes with much more resources then in academia. Here is a concrete example:

“Women’s study Center in Belgrade was established in 1992, as one of the first of its t kind in the postcommunist world. In 1993, at the peak of the economic crisis in Serbia, a salary of university professor was between 5-10 DM monthly. At the same time one lecture (1.5 hour) in the Center was paid 50 DM. My undergraduate students working in NGOs, or even better, in international donor organizations had 10-20 times higher salaries then university professors. Nowadays the ratio is 1:5. (Source: personal testimony of M.B.)”

The NGO sector in many cases was also much better connected in different international networks and better equipped technologically. So, the attraction of the NGO sector, where people could be decently paid, have good conditions for their work, connect to networks and travel, was very high in comparison to academia. The NGO sector in fact pulled much of the academic resources and re-directed them in the direction of agendas formulated by the donor organizations. What are the consequences for “scientific excellence?” The research problems, theoretical and methodological approaches, have not been formulated by the epistemic communities of semiperipheral societies, but by the core agendas mediated by donor organizations,

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so they were in a way external to scientific interests of semiperipheral societies. The effect is the production of knowledge which is compatible to the knowledge produced by the centre about semiperipheral societies. Weakening of the local epistemic communities led to the decrease of the possibility to articulate alternative conceptual frameworks and scientific paradigms, which would reflect the position of the semiperiphery and which would be based on standpoint epistemology. “Scientific excellence” in these terms has quite a dubious meaning.

With the beginning of the 1990s “transition” became one of the most popular, fastest growing topics in social sciences. To denote this explosion of “scientific research” in this field, one Hungarian sociologist, Anna Wessely, coined the term ”transitology” with inscribed irony. However, the term, ironically again, was very quickly accepted in social science circles, so “transitology” really became one of the “new sciences”. It had tremendous attraction for many of the scientists in the core countries, especially where they originated from one of the “transitional” countries, and spoke “one of the local languages”. The existent void in knowledge about former communist societies, together with spectacular social movements throughout the region, or even ethnic conflicts, created high interest in “transitional countries” by the core countries. That situation produced enormous possibilities for career advancement with somewhat exciting and “exotic” research on postcommunism. However, many of the scientists coming from the centre were well-equipped with many prejudices on what to expect to find about communism and postcommunism, using the “cold-war” paradigm explicitly or implicitly.

Complicated matters, such as, for example, war in former Yugoslavia were overnight turned into hundreds of books with simplistic explanations. While many of the so called “local scientists” were too responsible and too sensitive to oversimplify, that usually

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was not the problem for the “native outsiders”. While funds were almost impossible to obtain for the “locals”, they could have been easily provided for the “native outsiders”. The race in knowledge making was in fact very political, and new knowledge was often functioning to legitimize the political decisions of the core towards the semiperiphery.

One of the very popular and fast ways of “collecting” knowledge from the “local knowers”, but to reduce it to the “information”, was done by international projects, or even more often, by international conferences. Although international projects were very rewarding for the local scientists because they enabled some decent payments, contacts and exchange, often even the continuous networking, they were at the same time major channels for imposing the hierarchy between the “knowers”: those from the semiperiphery being in a role of suppliers of “raw” material, while those from the core having the authority to “theorize”. The imposition of Western theories was strong and undisputable. Whatever has been produced by Eastern scientists would immediately be located in the framework of “Western theoretical debates”, following “déjà vu” logic. Knowledge was continuously distorted by false “theorizing” on semiperipheral realities, often “pushing” them into the alien theoretical constructs, which were reinforcing the myth of modernisation. In return, these conceptual frameworks were also reshaping semiperipheral realities by the force of imported symbolic capital (Buadrillard, 1996, 2000). As observed by Cahalen:

“The so-called “end of the Cold War” has made possible more academic interaction between the “East” (East-Central Europe and the former Soviet Union) and “West” (Western Europe and North America) since 1989. For Western scholars, it has brought about the opportunity for us to reexamine our conceptions about life in the Eastern Bloc in the light of newly available information, see

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connections between peoples, cultures, states and economies where we previously did not, find out what our Eastern European colleagues have been publishing about all these years, integrate their knowledge, construct joint research projects, and in general expand our notion of the anthropological subject to include Eastern and Central Europe. Despite these great opportunities, the treatment of studying the Eastern Bloc has not changed significantly in the past six years. Instead there is a widespread exclusion of Eastern Europe from mainstream anthropological discussions. The East/West division can be seen in the distribution of papers and panels at conferences, publication of articles in journals, training of graduate students, and the ideology behind research funding in the U.S.” (Catalan, 21).

The very idea, deeply embedded in the Western world, that the “transition” from communism to postcommunism will be fast and not so difficult, (Heinrich, 1999) together with the idea that the semiperiphery is “not all that different” produced an emphasis on fast policy solutions instead of research based policies. That created a much better environment for so called “expertise” than for “knowledge”. Assumed similarities, and assumed inevitability of the “modernisation” road, encouraged fast policy making without profound research on social structures of the transitional countries. The result was that policy making was faster than knowledge making. This is a situation very different from the situation of the core countries where knowledge making usually precedes policy making. But, because it was assumed that knowledge from the core was applicable to the semiperiphery, policies were designed without substantial knowledge about semiperipheral societies and their capacity for change. The costs were often simply disastrous. Policy orientation of social sciences in semiperipheral societies deteriorated additionally the prestige of research based, scientific knowledge.

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”Scientists from the semiperiphery were overnight exposed to academic cultures very different from their own, but, unfortunately, also too much arrogance, even “aggressive ignorance about the particulars of European history, politics and culture.” (Cahalen: 24)

The specific communicational problem was related to very different intellectual traditions East and West. Analyzing the intellectual heritage of Wittgenstein, Freud and Mannheim, Wessely concludes that social inquiry represented in their works links to the specific intellectual tradition of Central Europe, which among other things uses specific language:

“It offers a literary and therefore highly flexible language suited to the description of non-Western type societies and social attitudes. This language moves freely between different stylistic registers and allows the combination of personal tone and interpretive approach with an effort to produce possibly objective analytical description of social phenomena. It suggests itself as a language of mediation between conceptual frameworks and lived experiences as well as between structurally different types of social experience.” (Wessely, 17)

The problem obviously could not be simply reduced to a question of linguistics, which was a large problem in East-West communication by itself, with the aggressive dominance of the English language, but more deeply, it touches upon the problem of communication emerging from the lack of adequate conceptual frameworks and academic traditions shared jointly by both Western and Eastern scientists.

“On a deep level, the roots of misunderstanding and the inability to communicate are due to different social representations and constructions of the world. Figurative and metaphorical terms characterized by a peculiar sort of obscurity and vagueness full of historical and cultural associations which are so rampant in Eastern social science writings, make Eastern scholarship about society impenetrable to Western scholars who would be eager to

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listen and understand. Moreover, intellectuals in the East are proud of being confusing and obscure, and tend to despise clarity and rationality of composition.” (Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996:119).

The roots of misunderstandings were/are deep, structural, and deserve recognition and serious intercultural scientific communication. These differences per se, deserve to be treated as par excellence scientific research problem. Instead, they are ignored, and misinterpreted:

“If East European social scientists claimed original ideas in the research processes, particularly if the ideas emphasized the differences or historical peculiarities of particular countries in the region, Westerners assumed that the Easterners did not understand Western models that require generalizing about all these “small countries”. If Easterners revealed their generally superior knowledge of the history of social and political thought, the history of the region or the markers of contemporary culture, Westerners wondered where their hypotheses were”.(Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996: 117)”

The lack of appreciation of intellectual difference of Eastern scientists, which was originating not from any kind of “intellectual inferiority”, but from very different intellectual traditions and different roles of intellectuals in semiperipheral societies, and arrogance expressed towards this difference in West-East scientific communication was structurally in many ways parallel to arrogance of androcentric knowledge in the history of Western science. “Theoretical fence” (Cathleen, 1996) simply made the scientific communication very difficult, let alone quality scientific communication. Instead, what was assumed was the superiority of the Western model, to which Eastern scientists should adjust, regardless of whether that really makes sense. The “burden” in formulating new cognitive, conceptual, epistemological approaches which would “cover” semiperipheral realities in their connection to core realities, was simply not shared equally by scientists East and West.

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The most dangerous consequence of this theoretical blindness and arrogance is the fact that it was assumed over and over again that Eastern scientists do not have much to say which is not already known, or else it is trivial, or irrelevant, while at the same time, in reality, some of them were trying to fill up the “epistemic void”, under the very unfavorable conditions of the collapse of the state funded scientific institutions. Others, on the other hand, accepted the “colonization of East European Social Science”, (Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele, 1996) complying with the role of “evidence suppliers”, or “data collectors”. In very asymmetrical power relations Eastern scientists were not in a position to influence funding which was predominantly, or almost exclusively, coming from the West, since the “transition” started. That was also framing the problems and methodologies:

“The new research being funded in the region now demanded comparisons across as many countries as possible both in the region and outside of it, to analyze the presumed differences still there between East and West. This resulted in massive quantitative data, producing statistics that could be analyzed in the computer-driven social science research facilities of the West” (Scheppele, in: Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele: 1996: 113)

Finally, different technical demands and standards continuously produce barriers for Eastern scientists in their efforts to communicate with West. The set of very concrete limitations, often far too humiliating to be expressed openly by Eastern scientists has been described by Kim Lane Scheppele, an American scientist who spent years in Eastern Europe:

“Had the Westerners understood the conditions of research in the region, they might have drawn the more sensible conclusion that Eastern library budgets could not permit the purchase of the huge range of journals at Western prices and it would be hard without such library facilities to keep up with literatures in the West. And if

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the Easterners had managed to reinvent from scratch a technique available in the West, such research accomplishments were looked down upon for failing to be original. If East European social scientist could not run fancy models of their personal computers at home to keep up with their Western counterparts, the Westerners assumed that the Easterners could not do the work, instead of concluding that perhaps computers with such power and software were not widely available to cash strapped researchers of the East.” (Scheppele, in: Csepeli, Orkeny, Scheppele: 1996: 117)

To summarize, social scientists were faced with many quite new and in many ways irresolvable problems with the beginning of the “transition”. What mostly influenced their position was a very asymmetrical position in West-East scientific projects, and their high dependency on funding from the West. The consequences were detrimental for the social science itself: it became disconnected from its traditional contexts of local societies, it became non responsive to the needs have local communities, and finally it become incapable of producing valuable concepts and paradigms to adequately theorize the tremendous social change occurring during the “transition”. The “scientific excellence” was not only denied to the social scientists of the semiperiphery, simply for the matter of “arrogant ignorance” and power misbalance, but, which is even worse, became almost impossible to achieve under the new conditions of the new division of labor along the continuum of core – the semiperiphery – periphery of globalized knowledge production, which was largely trivializing their scientific capacities. Mechanisms employed for the new marginalisation of social scientists were numerous: distribution of funds through NGOs; setting up of research agendas by donor organizations; inadequate treatment of the “local” scientists in journals, conferences, international projects; prioritizing the command of the English language over scientific knowledge; prioritizing skills over knowledge; the imposition of methodology,

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paradigms and simplistic explanations. The “epistemic void” thus persisted, while the “excellence” of the Western scientists being specialized in “transition” most probably has been rewarded and recognized. New conditions made it even clearer that “creators” of the knowledge come from the core, that the semiperiphery is complied to “translation” of that knowledge, or even simpler, to “transmission”, and that the final users, “local societies” will be further objectified through exercise of policies based on that kind of distorted knowledge.

Doing Gender Studies at the Semiperiphery: Debates and Alliances

Gender Studies in semiperipheral countries of Europe have been a very dynamic field with high attraction for women social scientists. One of the important explanations for the relatively fast growth of the field could be found in the fact that much of gender studies development was connected to NGOs, where they were often organized as “parallel educational organizations”. Funds were available, and often very stimulating in comparison to funds in academia (Blagojević, 1988; Milic, 2002). Being often “fast track” for postgraduate studies abroad, gender studies attracted many young scholars from social sciences and humanities, which are usually highly feminized disciplines. However, after a relatively good start, a new phase of the development of gender studies is inevitable:

“In Romania and in general in CEE region, it looks like the success story in terms of promoting gender equality in higher education is to be found at the level of gendering the content of higher education mainly by institutionalizing gender/women studies. In many of our countries, taking advantage of the university autonomy and the chaotic reforms of higher education,

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women/gender studies programmes and departments flourished.” (Grunberg, 2003:2).

Although women’s/gender studies at the semiperiphery have rather a short history (they were established mostly after the 1990s) they are facing the same challenges as women’s/gender studies in the West, which only proves that there are some structural constraints connected to the conservativism of androcentric academia and self positioning in relation to the movement, which exist regardless of the location, transculturally.

“Being in various stages of development they (gender studies, M.B.) Confront the same types of dilemmas that challenged Western academic feminism in the past:

• mainstreaming vs. curriculum transformation;

• autonomy vs. integration;

• naming the programmes (women/gender/feminist studies);

• level of introducing gender studies;

• relations between academia and activism (validation of gender studies as mainstreaming theories or mainly as practically oriented, as research with a purpose) (Grunberg, 2003:2).”

In any case, these dilemmas connect to both production of “excellence”, as well as to recognition of it. For example, establishment of gender studies outside academia highly relativized their academic contribution. And although in some cases this could be attributed to the conservativism of academia, in other cases the problem was the real absence of academic criteria behind knowledge production and dissemination in the field of gender studies. The rapid expansion of courses, seminars, trainings related to women and to women’s/gender studies, included very many “new comers”, and among them some who would not, under the normal academic

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quality competition, be able to stay in the field. In other words, while the positioning outside academia eased up some developments, it also inhibited quality control.

Although at first sight, rapid quantity development of gender studies at the semiperiphery seems to be a “success” story, many more facts should be factored into the picture, to understand the complexity of their developments. For example, at the semiperiphery, gender studies are not recognised as a scientific field, and they mainly function as highly ghettoized intellectual endeavor, without any substantial academic dialogue with non-gender scientists. Even when “scientific excellence” exists it simply can not be validated by local epistemic communities, because they are very small, and additionally, in the case of gender studies, fragmented across discipline boundaries (social sciences versus humanities). The true “interdiscplinarity” of gender studies is not yet reached because they are still basically structured around the disciplines. However, sometimes “interdiscplinarity” covers the lack of quality, and sometimes it is stretching over too many disciplines to be adequately appreciated.

Additionally, the lack of clear rules and academic criteria together with funding possibilities created very high competition in the field, which gave rise to the influence of network based selections (or better to say, clans), while meritocracy, quality and originality have been marginalized. In many instances, gender studies, usually organized by one or several “women leaders” in the highly unregulated setting of NGO scenes, tended to repeat all of the weaknesses of male hierarchies, exclusions, and “old boy’s clubs”.

Scientific promotion of individual women scientists from the semiperiphery, because of the high dependency on foreign donations, became extremely dependent, not so much on their actual scientific contribution, although it would be difficult to evaluate it anyhow, for the reasons already described, but on their connections with the

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donors. “Scientific excellence” thus became not the precondition, but the consequence of research funding. “Scientific excellence” in the filed of gender studies grew to be heavily dependent on power networks connected to the funds, but also on the successful accomplishment of “transmission” work for “feminism for export” (Eisenstein, 1998). This was usually achieved by tremendous translation activity, which also enabled direct contacts with Western authors eager to have their works published abroad. Transmission as a more mechanical and less creative way of communication knowledge from the core to the semiperiphery was, nevertheless, a very rewarding activity for semiperipheral gender scientists. Core - the semiperiphery relations in fact determined that it was more rewarding to be “transmitter” than to try to be “creator” of knowledge. Owing to American based funds, the “transmission” of American feminisms was prevailing at the semiperiphery in last decade, and was the most rewarding for individual gender scientists from the semiperiphery.

Gender studies in semiperipheral societies were mainly “imported” as part of the knowledge from the West which largely corresponded to Western postmodern realities. This fact in return determined much of the focus and present content of gender studies at the semiperiphery. While some fields “exploded”, such as “women and media” issues, others, such as “rural women” were simply marginalized. Donor organizations dictate the focus and shifts of foci together with decreasing funds create very fragmented and superficial “knowledge” which can not easily be accumulated and integrated into wider conceptual frameworks. And without this accumulation of knowledge it is not possible to create new conceptual frameworks, so much needed at the semiperiphery, in fact it is not very likely that “excellent” knowledge could be produced.

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However, although very exposed to the Western knowledge paradigms, in a very similar way and mainly through the same mechanisms, gender studies at the semiperiphery expressed a much more critical stand and resistance, than was the case with other social science disciplines. Following Mohanti, Slavova suggests that: “Emerging East European feminisms seem to be engaged in a similar double-sided project: on the one hand, critically appropriating and subverting established Western feminist models, on the other - striving to construct their own feminist identity and politics (Slavova, 2001:5)”. This was vividly expressed in the so-called East-West Feminist Debate, which started already at the beginning of the 1990s and still is on-going.22 The explanation for this more autonomous and more critical stand of gender studies at the semiperiphery could be traced to two facts: that they relied heavily on postcolonial feminist critique, and secondly, that their criticism was encountered with much more openness and benevolence than it was the case with other social science disciplines. In a way, marginality of gender studies, both in the core and at the semiperiphery contributed to the more balanced exchange of ideas, to alliances which have the potential to become epistemic communities along the continuum core - the semiperiphery – periphery.

26 East-West feminist debate started at the beginning of the 1990s when Slavenka Drakulic, a feminist from Croatia and Nanette Funk, an American feminist exchanged views. Later it included almost all major feminist scholars from Eastern Europe. The focus of the debate was how and why Western feminisms are not simply applicable to Eastern realities. However, it should be noted that focusing on these differences and explanations, took a lot of intellectual efforts and resources from the already small and weak feminist communities at the semiperiphery. So, in a way, this debate, although precious for the delineating the field for feminist theory and research at the semiperiphery was often imposing “wrong questions”, thus drawing attention from many of the burning issues during the “transition”. Eastern feminists were caught up in a vicious circle of explaining “their difference” using Western conceptual frameworks, without being able to first do the research and/or communicate the problems in their local, or semiperipheral epistemic communities.

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Excellent Woman Scientist at the Semiperiphery: Living in Limbo

For an excellent woman scientist (in social sciences, possibly doing gender studies) living at the semiperiphery during “transition”, “scientific excellence” is a highly ambivalent issue. Contrary to the models of “normal” career development in the West, her position is full of contradictions and high costs of possible choices. Even more, her “choices” are often not really choices, but the result of accidents and circumstances, which in the highly chaotic environment of semiperipheral societies create sudden possibilities, or marginalize her further. There is not much regularity in career development at semiperipheral societies.

Different strategies, which are at least theoretically at her disposal, include: “brain drain” with more or less fixed alternate location in the core; endless mobility (going back and forth from native country) in fact “scientific nomadism”; stable employment in the scientific institution at home country; or giving up a scientific career all together. If she decides to “brain drain” she can hardly expect to be evaluated according to her quality in the core countries. Lacking the important cultural, symbolic and social capital, she will most probably remain marginal, pushed into the role of a “specialist” for her native country. However, in most of the cases, the triviality of her professional tasks will exclude any possibility of working on really challenging issues, doing the “excellent” work and obtaining recognition for “scientific excellence”. If she chooses to become endlessly mobile she will need to give up family life, stable relationships and support networks. Instead she would need to develop professional networks, possibly to connect to “influential people” and become close to them. She will gain a lot of knowledge

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from the careful observations of different settings; she will develop her adaptability and skills of intercultural communication. However, her nomadism might not materialize into “excellent knowledge” for the very reason that too much effort is put into nomadism itself. A stable environment with good working conditions might be constantly out of reach. If she stays at a home institution, she might be integrated into the local community, but be confined to the fringes, and the more original and creative her work is, the smaller the audience will she have. In other words, choosing to produce “real excellence” is either impossible or unrewarding.

The position of transmitter is much more comfortable. In fact this is the ideal position for the social scientist at the semiperiphery, which means that she simply disseminates knowledge from the West. The Western colleagues are generally very generous and supportive to those who assume the role of transmitter. They are invited to conferences, supported with scholarships, and even become friends. From the point of view of pure rationality, being a transmitter is the most rational strategy for the individual woman scientist at the semiperiphery. She can succeed in improving her quality of life, even her references. Her “scientific excellence” might be recognised even without “excellent” work.

In other words, an excellent woman social scientists at the semiperiphery can hardly be the creator of “excellent” knowledge while staying at the semiperiphery, even if she succeeds to do such impossible work, mostly because there will be no one to take notice of it. Measuring invisibility is difficult, indeed.

“The invisibility of Eastern women knower is shocking to me, over and over again. I consider that to be in fact the same kind of blindness which has been widely known as the phenomena of 'invisible women', when what a woman says at a meeting with many more men is neither heard nor recorded. Here is an example:

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I was mentoring one American student at CEU, Budapest, who was there for her MA thesis making an analysis of women’s NGOs in the post communist region. I gave her contacts to interview Eastern women scientists, who have done research on these issues. She was supposed to interview them, not as local activists, but women who have knowledge and expertise on those issues. The result was that, although using extensively the ideas of those women scientists, including myself, although those ideas were making the large part of the body of the text of the thesis, she at the end referred mainly to the sources which were of Western origin, treating them as ’theoretical framework’ while equally theoretical ideas of Eastern scientists were treated as ’evidence’, or simply appropriated. There was a clear discrepancy in the amount of knowledge she got from the Eastern women scientists and her treatment of those sources. Eastern Women scientists were simply degraded to ’informants’, while at the same time quite trivial ideas of American scientists were given full authority and have been cited. But this is very common thing. The above mentioned student of mine obtained a very good grade. She was not punished for the incorrectness. I decided that she simply suffered from the same type of blindness as many other people I meet regularly, and that there is no point in making her pay. This is an interesting case because it reveals that even when in a position of authority, and I was a mentor in this concrete case, woman ’the knower’ from the East is not basically perceived as such”.(Source: Personal testimony M.B).

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Chapter 2

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• Bodrijar Z. (2000) Savršen zločin, Beograd: Beogradski krug.

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• Grunberg L. (2003) Compromises in institutionalizing gender studies: Expert in gender (in Romania) What for?, ENWISE workshop: Starting a Debate With Women Scientists from the Balkan Region. Brussels, 11-12 November 2003.

• Harding S. (1998) Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies. Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indian University Press.

• Heinrich G.H. (ed.) (1999) Institution Building in the New Democracies: Studies in post-postcommunism. Budapest: Collegium Budapest.

• Iveković R. (1993) Women, nationalism and war: Make love not war. Hypatia,VIII (4).

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