The Ontology of Evaluation of Academic Science: Challenges to Latin America

• In Event: Evaluation of Academic Science and Scientists: Perspectives from Latin America

Abstract

Evaluation of academic science nurture policy-making processes focused in science and technology operative problems. Indeed, funds assignments, projects assessments, publishing peer review, and researchers’ profiles, to name some, are important outcomes of this evaluative process. However, even though peer communities are extended to include non-scientific actors, science and technology resist perspectives which encourage post-normal dialogues. Terms like validity, quality, reliability and impartiality are used as internal barriers to avoid the participation of external actors. In this presentation, we want to discuss the political ontological problems in evaluation processes, that is, what worldview underlies trough which set of evaluative practices. We consider Latin America offers a culturally heterogeneous geographical area to address this concern. If making knowledge is also a process of making worlds, then the evaluation of a given knowledge brings to the core a fundamental question: what for? This question is related to the need of think alternatives in a global context of asymmetric knowledge relations. In that sense, an ontological opening of academic science is needed to articulate different ways of produce knowledge and multiples scales of evaluation. Can science be redirected beyond its ontological commitment to the idea of development? And if so, through which ways? Moreover, what are the challenges of put in dialogue different knowledge systems? Do we require a different notion of State, and politics in a broader sense, in order to make changes in how we evaluate science and we are being evaluating by science?

Authors

• Marx Jose Gomez Liendo, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

• Maria Victoria Canino, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas