Power Dynamics in International Research Collaborations in Kazakhstan

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Moving beyond ‘north’ and ‘south’ in international research collaboration

Proposal

The dominant discourse about the structure of relations in international research collaborations is based on the assumption of unequal power distribution between the global “North” and “South”, which arises from a set of resource constraints - financial, intellectual and institutional – exclusively on one of the sides. In the existing discourse “the North” equates to intellectual superiority, better access to funding and an institutional context, which is more favorable for creativity and innovation; while “the South” is synonymous with backwardness in all these respects.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate two alternative interpretations of the dynamics of the relations, one of which originates in post-structural, and the other in the critical feminist paradigm. These theories will be applied to the analysis of several cases of domestic and international research collaborations involving researchers from Kazakhstan, where power distributions are reversed from the one predicted by the structuralist discourse, i.e. they exemplify empowered researchers from “the South” and disempowered researchers from “the North”, which undermine the assumption of a fixed hierarchy as well as the notion of “South” and “North” themselves.

The specific theories that will be used in the analysis will be the post-structuralist Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005; Law, 1992); and the critical feminist Performative Systems Theory (Allen, 1998; Rose, 2002). The former conceptualizes the world as a system of ever shifting relations and posits that nothing exists outside those relations including any social forces which may shape the relationships. The latter arose from cultural geography’s attempts to reconceptualize power within geographic space and the critical insight that the assumption and the promotion of the view about the existence of a fixed social structure contributes to the reproduction of existing hegemonies. Performativity Systems Theory posits that social categories, including such categories as the global “North” and “South”, are never stabilized and the systems are ever reinterpreted by the actors involved in the relations under specific conditions shaping the interaction. In addition to these two theories, I will refer to French and Raven’s (1959) classification of Sources of Power.

The two theories will be applied to the analysis of five revelatory cases of international research collaboration involving researchers from Kazakhstan. The first case will discuss experiences of international faculty in Kazakhstan in collaboration with partners outside Kazakhstan. The second case will discuss the experiences of a Western-educated local faculty member at the “world-class” aspiring Nazarbayev University in collaborating with partners in Western countries. The third case will discuss the experience of collaboration between a local Western educated researcher and a local domestically educated researcher. The fourth case would discuss the experiences of a faculty in a Kazakhstani university when collaborating with researchers from Russia (which is not clearly North or South). The fifth case would discuss the experiences of international collaboration of a faculty, who have significant funding from Kazakhstan or access to good research facilities/medical data/etc.

Author

• Aliya Kuzhabekova, Nazarbayev University