Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South

This book investigates and critically interprets the underrepresentation of the global South in global knowledge production. The author analyses the serious bias towards scholars and institutions from this region: he argues that this phenomenon causes serious disadvantages not only for authors and institutions, but global science as well by impeding the flow of fresh, innovative scholarship. This book uses a combination of field theory and world-systems analysis to explain the motives and dynamics behind the geopolitical and societal inequalities in the system of global knowledge production. Subsequently, the author offers several solutions by which these inequalities could be reduced, or even eliminated. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of knowledge inequalities, and knowledge production in the global South.

"Márton Demeter's monograph invokes rich anecdotal, empirical and scientometric evidence to delineate the contours of a world system that preserves thedominance of Western knowledge and scholars and the westernisation or peripheralisation of the rest - a system defined by geopolitical and material inequalities, socio-economic class differences, institutional elitism and publishing biases. Demeter's work counters narratives that present academia as meritocratic and that justify disparities in world publications on the basis of pure rigour, exposing rather norms and values that perpetuate a western elitist system and peripheralise those who happen to lack this cultural capital. Demeter's work adds to an expanding field of research documenting how Anglophone standards and biases in journal indexing, peer review and editorial board recruitment marginalise consistently the Global South. His practical and concrete suggestions to subvert this system of horizontal and vertical inequalities could not be timelier and provides momentum to decolonisation movements in higher education across the world."  

-Dr Romina