The Emotional Politics of Research Collaboration by unknow

The Emotional Politics of Research Collaboration by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Gender Studies, Sociology
ISBN: 9781135055332
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-07-18T04:00:00+00:00


DEFICIT DISCOURSE: THE PRODUCTION OF FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY

The rise of individualized accountability has come in tandem with the production of criteria for such accountability which have sought to, and in many ways have, reshaped how researchers are “judged”. Where once publication as such was a cause for joy, now only publications of particular kinds and in particular contexts (journals, publishing houses, etc.) count. This specifying of criteria has both refined levels of competitiveness (researchers can now compete on so many different fronts) and the potential for failure and inadequacy. A male professor at a well-established university in the UK told me that when he had brought in an international grant of five million GBP that did not, however, come with the overheads—English research councils now suggest that 60 percent or are more appropriate to reflect the supposedly “true” costs of research—his vice-chancellor asked him when he was going to bring in some “proper money”. The deficit or “not-enough” discourse here mobilized which researchers/academics are the object of all too often, produces a perpetual sense of inadequacy among them which contributes to the culture of blame that has taken hold. In another context, Wendy Brown (1995) describes the subject’s, here taken to mean the researcher’s, failure to “make itself” as assumed by disciplining discourses such as the one just outlined (i.e. the “failure” to get a “proper” grant) as generating the necessity either to “find a reason within itself” (=self-blaming) or to find “a site of external blame upon which to avenge its hurt and redistribute its pain” (67). Working with others in research collaborations provides, with some facility, such sites of external blame, and not only for what happens within the collaboration but also for what happens without, irrespective of the degree of control the blamed has over that without. Discussing the issue of blame attribution in the context of “failing schools” in the UK, Thrupp (1998) has shown how in blaming schools for their “failure” a “technicist discourse” (197) is used that takes “little account of the social and political contexts of the schools” which have, at the very least, contributed to their failure. Thrupp points out that schools in geographic areas of high degrees of socioeconomic disadvantage are more likely to fail and for reasons that have little to do with the performance of the school per se. However, in the “race to blame” such contextual factors, over which schools have no control, are not taken into account.

That limited control ties in with questions of responsibility already alluded to. As Marilyn Strathern (2006: 532) argues, “People have to take responsibility … [but they are also] limited by their own and others’ ability or willingness to discharge [it].” That willingness depends in part on researchers’ recognition that they have such responsibility. However, in many collaborative research situations, it is quite unclear who has responsibility for what—indeed, in my experience, this is often not, or rather broadly, discussed and in consequence, researchers can fall into particular patterns of behavior based



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