The role of bibliometric research assessment in a global order of epistemic injustice: a case study of humanities research in Denmark

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we consider, from critical perspectives, the ways in which research assessment governs the production of academic knowledge and can contribute to epistemic injustices. This issue is examined through a fieldwork study in 2018 of the implications of the Danish Bibliometric Indicator for research in a humanities department of a research-intensive Danish university. We draw on Connell’s Southern Theory in conjunction with Bourdieu’s work on language and power to show how humanities research in the Danish language is pushed onto the periphery of global disciplinary fields. The paper highlights that regimes of governance such as bibliometric research assessment affect not only what is published and where but also what is recognised as scientific or academic language. Such regimes can contribute significantly to the generation and reproduction of epistemic injustices through limitations on how, and by whom, legitimate knowledge is defined, produced and promulgated. We argue that it is time to recognise this as the colonisation of research.

KEYWORDS:

• research evaluation
• governance
• research practice
• epistemic governance
• epistemic injustice

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge two anonymous reviewers, the university in which this research took place and all participants, and The Warrnambool Collective.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. At the time of writing the medium- and longer-term effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the international fee-paying student market was not fully known.

2. The BFI defines ‘international’ as publications where not more than two-thirds of the authors are from the one country and that are published in an international language. See https://docplayer.dk/50635147-Samlet-notat-om-den-bibliometriske-forskningsindikator.html

3. The term ‘small language’ is used widely but without definition in policy documents (e.g. European Commission, 2018). We mean a language that is dominant in one small country.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julie Rowlands

Julie Rowlands is a  Associate Professor in education leadership in the centre for Research into Educational Impact at Deakin University, Australia. She researches higher education systems, university governance, academic quality assurance and organisational change with a particular focus on the impact of systems of decision-making and control on academic voice and academic work. She is a critical education sociologist and is especially drawn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu and to feminist theoretical perspectives.

Susan Wright

Susan Wright is Professor of Educational Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Higher Education Futures (CHEF) at Aarhus University. She studies people’s participation in large scale processes of transformation, focusing on university reforms in Europe and the Asia-Pacific Rim, and works with concepts of audit culture, governance, organisation, contestation and the anthropology of policy. She co-edits the journal LATISS (Learning and Teaching: International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences).