What Counts as Knowledge in Educational Research Funding?

• In Event: 47.026 - Silence as Evidence: Resistance and Epistemicide in Educational Systems

Abstract

What counts as knowledge in educational research funding becomes a fair question in a country when we have an uprising feminist movement in higher education in Chile, demanding sexual harassment policies in the universities and a feminist and non-sexist education. Analyzing the database of the main public agency that funds research in Chile, there is only one funded research project on issues of “gender and education” between 2005-2017 (out of 1,112). Only one. This is a fact that invites us to think on issues of what is “fundable” and how specific knowledges are made invisible for the academic communities. The argument of this paper is to make visible how epistemicide gets produced and maintained. In other words, that what is generally funded as knowledge represents a very small proportion of the global diversity of knowledges and so the contemporary funding research system can be characterized as working with patriarchal colonized knowledge. What is more relevant is how certain research has not been considered ‘fundable’ and is regarded as socially illegitimate (Butler, 2006). Furthermore, academic identities and survival in the academia, increasingly depends on success in gaining research funding and publications (Morley, 2016). The tie between funding and the type of themes and research questions becomes a relevant issue to think of when boundaries between winning and losing research become determinate to advancement in the academic path.

Chile has developed a strong agenda on advancing human capital which has increased the number of scholars doing research in Chile in the past decades (Author, 2017). However, the government has maintained a low percentage of the GDP (0,36% ) for R+D (OECD, 2009, 2016, 2017), and during the last years there has been a number of public complaints from researchers about the precariousness of the academic work. As a context, the increase of scholars doing research make the tension of funding and diversification of knowledges tangible. In this study, we analyzed Fondecyt from CONICYT, the main funding research instrument and the main public agency in charge of the national research policies, respectively. We took the main data base on research between 2005 and 2017, where 9956 projects were approved. A content analysis of the projects shows that in the educational field there are no projects that addresses gender issues (1 out of 1112 project), and from the 9556 funded projects in the analyzed period, just 26 state gender or women issues (0.2%), mostly coming from Medicine field.
These results show that in spite of the efforts Conicyt has not addressed appropriately the support for the diversification on the type of knowledge that is being addressed. More and better policies should be considered, for which is necessary a rupture of the historical dominance of mainstream knowledge in academia.

Author

• AnaLuisa Munoz-Garcia, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile