All Rivers Run into the Sea: Digital Space’s Ecological Research Cultures Shaping Situated Convergence at Sino-Anglophone Research Centres’ International Collaborations

• In Event: Navigating global, national and local education policies and practices

Proposal

In the 1990s, the prevalence of information technology and globalisation constructed an emerging multi-polar landscape of the global science system, shifting from the Anglo-American dominated centre-periphery model. With intensifying globalisation, the purpose of research at universities tends to serve the neoliberal research assessment framework with short-term impact as the economisation of research. Individual researchers strive and survive in a research culture of competition rather than collaboration. Against the background of turbulent geopolitical changes, there is an intensifying stalemate between nation-states’ neoliberal-conditioned science systems and global collaborative networks rooted in researchers’ autonomous agency. However, the internet is increasingly shaping ecological research cultures by democratising knowledge through revolutionary knowledge exchange between emerging countries and Euro-American countries, especially through open science, digital archives, social-media linked academic networks, and bibliometric-database shaped global science system.

This cross-cultural comparative study explores the influence of internet-facilitated global communicative networks on forming ecological research cultures in international research collaborations at four research centres for higher education, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, and mainland China. The study uses sequential mixed methods, involving bibliometric network analysis of the four research centres’ co-authorship publications and semi-structured in-depth interviews of twenty-one early-career researchers at the four research centres, and the digital observation via a critical social media analysis combined with social network analysis of the LinkedIn’s role in democratising the Global South grass-root scholars’ academic voice in transforming the hierarchical research collaboration networks to multi-polar ones and moving beyond the centre-periphery global knowledge system. The study aims to enrich practical strategies and critical conceptualisation of social media and internet-facilitated global communicative network ecological research cultures for international research collaborations following ‘all rivers run into the sea’ (hai na bai chuan) epistemology as situated convergence. Openness, equality, and inclusivity as a level common ground of embracing heterogeneous bodies of knowledges for global common goods are interpreted through two interconnected clues, involving the water-cycle systems thinking of reciprocity in international research collaborations and Taoist philosophy of water’s supreme goodness as human nature aligns with ethical-oriented ecological research cultures shaping situated convergence by scholars’ autonomous morality. By contrast, hegemonic performative research culture shaping researchers’ neoliberal subjectivity hinders sustainable research collaborations.

Finally, the research interprets the meaning of digital technology like open-access and multi-lingual knowledge production, dissemination, and circulation through social media, bibliometric databases, and open science’s role in constructing situated convergence by exemplifying (1) researchers’ ethical agency in collaborations echoing the virtues of water (shang shan ruo shui上善若水) in the researchers’ social media’s autonomous interaction in forming globally-justice research collaboration, (2) intertwined self-other cultural positionality in global researchers’ knowledge exchange in the internet informed by the philosophy of research like water’s reflection (3) open-ended research assessment countering contingency of the ‘rightness of the present this’ (yin shi因时) encountering the Anglophone benchmarking and English-linguistic bias of performance-based bibliometric measurement like standardised databases of Web of Science and Scopus (4) less-performative (wu wei 无为) national research governance conciliating researchers’ autonomy for international research collaboration, especially in a post-truth era facing the geopolitical tensions with internet surveillance and disinformation spread through the politics of digital space, and (5) ecological research cultures shifting competitive divergences to situated convergence through yin-yang transactions towards a reciprocal global science system.

Author

• Yiran MA, Department of Education, University of Oxford