Conceptualising the academic periphery: the case of Eastern European academic systems

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if foreign-born academics employed in Poland and Slovakia have a sense of being marginalised in the global world of knowledge production, and, if so, what are the basic indicators of this marginalisation. The paper is based on 100 qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in Poland and 40 interviews conducted in Slovakia. All interviewees agreed that Poland and Slovakia were peripheries but they conceptualised their peripheral status in many distinctive ways. The paper discusses six indicators of peripheral status of Eastern Europe academic systems, referred to as ‘status periphery’, ‘career periphery’, ‘workplace periphery’, ‘mental periphery’, ‘language periphery’, and ‘relational periphery’. The discussion focusses on how these two exemplary post-communist European peripheries differ from other academic peripheries.

KEYWORDS:

• Global peripheries
• international faculty
• foreign-born scholars
• Central and Eastern Europe
• academic migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Due to many similarities between ‘southern’ and ‘post-colonial’ theory, Connell can also be treated as a post-colonial theoretician. The main difference between the two is that while both theories pertain to global power and economic disparities, they approach them from different perspectives.

2 Unfortunately, a very limited number of studies mentioned the issues pertaining to mental peripherality, as well as workplace and relational peripherality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland [grant number 0142/DLG/2017/10].