Whose Knowledge Matters? Decolonization, Governance and the Politics of Knowledge in Higher Education

• In Event: Government relationship with higher education

Proposal

Whose Knowledge Matters?
Decolonization, Governance and the Politics of Knowledge in Higher Education

Hans N. Weiler, Stanford University Jonathan D. Jansen, University of Stellenbosch


The premise of this paper is that much current scholarship on higher education suffers from a major deficit in understanding the relationship between power and knowledge (Neave 2006). This premise leads us to examine in this paper a number of theoretical propositions on the politics of knowledge in order to subject this relationship to a more penetrating kind of empirical analysis in the study of higher education.
In the development of our argument, we take it for granted that the relationship between power and knowledge is reciprocal. The exercise of political power through policies, allocations and regulations relies upon an established and authoritative knowledge base, just as the production, dissemination and utilization of knowledge operates under the terms of an existing system of power relationships. The role of expertise in the allocation of public resources, the determination of educational objectives and priorities, the rationalization of rules and regulations for the functioning of societies and its institutions, or the metrics of social and political hierarchies are typical stages on which the dynamics of the politics of knowledge are being displayed. Not surprisingly, the relationship between power and knowledge has been conceptualized as a relationship of “reciprocal legitimation” (Weiler 2011; Nandy 2000).
Key issues in the comparative analysis of higher education would greatly benefit from being understood and examined as manifestations of the politics of knowledge in this reciprocal sense; these include normative conflicts over curricular choices, the politics of choice and influence in setting research priorities, or the recruitment, promotion, support, and disciplining of knowledge personnel. The governance of the production of knowledge (and of its institutional manifestation in universities) and the decolonization of the interaction between different knowledge cultures appear as particularly critical issues to be subjected to the question of whose knowledge matters (Gran 1986).
These two issues serve as the focus of this paper in an attempt to illustrate the explanatory potential of a critical theory of the politics of knowledge in the study of higher education, drawing for empirical reference on developments and debates in Southern Africa and Western Europe as cases in point.
In a first part, the paper makes the case for the changing political dynamics of knowledge production from the perspective of the Global South. It will challenge the established schema once given by world systems theory, and dependency theory in particular, of a center-periphery arrangement that governs not only the economic production of goods but also the intellectual production of knowledge. To make this argument, the paper will draw on three empirical cases from contemporary South Africa (cardiovascular research, history research and research on HIV/AIDS) to demonstrate how research and researchers from the global South increasingly come to provide international leadership in knowledge production and where researchers from the global North not only join African teams as learning partners but come to benefit also from the training, expertise and supervision of African research leaders. This reassertion of African leadership in the global production of knowledge challenges notions of the developing world as being mere sites of the application of foreign knowledge or as places of extracting raw data for further processing and publication in the North. In this perspective on the politics of knowledge, the center-periphery model is seen as an incomplete description for the changing relations between different knowledge cultures in North-South relationships. Based on the empirical cases presented in the paper, there is grounds for new theorizing about the relationship between knowledge and power for, as Raewyn Connell (2017) observes, “it is a serious mistake to equate global marginality with passivity”, and relations between North and South reveal “a pattern of agency….not a position of powerlessness” (Connell et al. 2017; Connell 2007). The paper shows how this changed perspective on the transnational politics of knowledge directly and profoundly affects the South African discourse on key issues in higher education curricula. The growing assertion of authority in knowledge production by the Global South does not, however, mean that the power/knowledge thesis is resolved; questions about “whose knowledge matters” are still very salient in the governance of higher education in many parts of the world (Lim and Apple 2016; Fuller 2006).
The second part of the paper therefore takes up the issue of the governance of knowledge as a key dimension of the politics of knowledge; it reflects both the more general debate about governance in modern societies and the more specific discourse on the governance of the production, dissemination and utilization of knowledge that has emerged – both as a matter of discourse and of institutional management – in Europe and the United States, and certainly elsewhere as well (Weiler 2014). In this part of the paper, the basic argument about whose knowledge matters is fourfold: (a) in the governance of knowledge, the principal governance functions of regulation, allocation, evaluation and signification are profoundly affected by the predominance of hierarchical or participatory modes of governance; (b) different modes of governance reflect profoundly different conceptions of knowledge and its sources of legitimacy; (c) the political contestation of knowledge and the rise of anti-intellectualism in many of our societies are likely to have a profound effect on the governance of knowledge; and (d) one of the more intriguing challenges to the governance of knowledge lies in the remarkable degree of institutional ambivalence that characterizes higher education. The standing of interdisciplinary research and teaching, the role of the humanities, the cognizance of the cultural parameters of knowledge, the interaction of funding, technology and knowledge valuation, the representation of societal interests in the governance of knowledge and the increasingly precarious situation of international exchange in the world of knowledge are the key issues around which this part of the paper constructs its theoretical agenda.

Authors

• Hans N. Weiler, Stanford University

• Jonathan Jansen, Stellenbosch University