Aarhus University Seal

Center and peripheries as the framework for studying academic resistance

CHEF Talk with Franciszek Krawczyk

Info about event

Time

Thursday 12 May 2022,  at 15:00 - 16:00

Location

Zoom

Organizer

CHEF

Abstract

The aim of the presentation is to challenge some of the critics of the framework which understands academia through center-periphery relations. The most widespread understanding of centers and peripheries in science and higher education seems to be that they are two regions of knowledge production where the central has a strongly one-sided influence on the peripheral one. In fact, such an approach is often too much focused on the analysis of the mechanisms of the domination of the center than on the resistance of peripheries. However, the central argument of the presentation will be that center-periphery framework can be very useful when applied to study academic resistance. I will provide an example of the resistance of Adam Schaff – an important figure for organization of science and higher education in Poland after the Second World War. When he tried to resist to some extent both influences of Soviet Union and Western Imperialism, the awareness of a relatively stable geopolitical structure played an important role for him. I will be arguing that understanding resistance through center-periphery relations can help to better understand motivations and decisions made by the resisting actors. However, it is important to see center-periphery relations as historic and dynamic and do not essentialize them.

Speaker

Franciszek Krawczyk is a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and a member of Scholarly Communication Research Group. He prepares his Ph.D. on the topic “Science without center? Resistance against domination of the center from semi-peripheries while working in the Evaluation game project. In his study, he focuses on the modern history of (self)organization and evaluation of science in Poland.

He wrote an MA thesis entitled “Scholarly Communication in the Model of Centro-Peripheral Dependencies: The Case of Predatory Journals” as a part of the Evaluation game project and published two articles on the topic (“On the Geopolitics of Academic Publishing: The Mislocated centres of Scholarly Communication” and “How is open access accused of being predatory? The impact of Beall’s lists of predatory journals on academic publishing”.

Research Interests: geography of knowledge, predatory journals, research evaluation, sociology of science


Chair: Dr Søren S.E. Bengtsen, Co-Director of CHEF, Aarhus University, Denmark

Time: May 12th, 2022 at 15.00-16 Central European Summer Time (CEST) (UTC+2)

Place: A Zoom-link will be shared with the participants closer to the event