Research Selectivity and the Destruction of Authentic Scholarship? The View from the (semi) Periphery

Simon Warren, NUI GalwayMarcin Starnawski, Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa (University

of Lower Silesia) Marcin Gołębniak, Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa (University of

Lower Silesia)

Trying to define the research problematic

• Beginnings

• A particular policy issue – ‘research

selectivity’

• An organising metaphor – ‘semi-peripheral’

Research selectivity – Ireland

Selection as the Struggle for Visibility

• Global

• Institutional

• Individual

Global University Rankings

National Auditing and Differential/Competitive Funding – Compact/REF

Institutional Audit Research? A view from the

centre…

Initial Organising Questions• What does the experience

of research selectivity look like in semi-peripheral systems of European higher education?

• In what ways are semi-peripheral systems governed through regional and global systems of surveillance and measurement?

• How is internal selectivity arranged at both national and institutional level (e.g. how are the humanities dealt with)?

• How are different categories of academic managed in relation to research selectivity?

Reputational Ghetto* – the case of the Humanities?

*Based on: Slater, T. and Anderson, N. (2012), The reputational ghetto: territorial stigmatisation in St Paul’s, Bristol. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37: 530–546. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00490.x

Bandit's Roost (1888) by Jacob Riis, from How the Other Half Lives. This image is Bandit's Roost at 59½Mulberry Street, considered the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of New York City.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Riis

Tentative Analysis

• PRIVATE TROUBLES/PUBLIC ISSUES

• TRANSFORMING DISCIPLINARY PRACTICE

• EPISTEMIC DISJUNCTURE

Next?

• Develop a network – expand research capacity– COST Action– NORFACE

• Publication – work with and around the paradox