7.3.1 Positionality

Legitimate knowledge is framed in relation to positionality – in terms of both who is the knowledge producer and where the knowledge is being produced. The positionality component of legitimate knowledge relates to the perceived ‘right’ of the authority. The second component of legitimate knowledge entails the processes by which it is recognised as legitimate. This component relates to the ‘acceptance’ of the authority.

As a White UK researcher on race in education, David Gillborn reflects on his positionality in conducting research in schools: ‘As a White researcher I would be able to hear things from staff that I would not hear if necessarily I was a minoritised researcher’ (p. 4). In addition, his positionality as a White male researching racism gives a greater legitimacy to the knowledge produced: ‘Members of the oppressor class are taken more seriously as witnesses to oppression’ (p. 4). In addition, career progression and positionality raise ethical issues: ‘White researchers come along, do their research, go off and build a career and nothing changes for the Black folk experiencing the inequalities’ (p. 3). Gillborn formerly directed the Centre for Research on Race in Education at the University of Birmingham, the only university-based centre at an English university focused on racism in education. He comments wryly that: ‘I do not think that’s coincidental, it tells you a lot about the Academy’ (p. 4), aware of the politics of his positionality as a White male in the production on knowledge and its legitimation in the field.

Gillborn reflects on the reception of his work by Black academics, professionals, and communities, noting that positionality is definitely present in the room, but that he believes his work is well received. However, the status of the knowledge is always filtered by perceived positionality by the audience:

Positionality is invoked in the following excerpt with a reflection on who can legitimately do what research:

Conversely, for ethnic minority academics, positionality can play an invisible role in self-censoring, where in the following account, the Lecturer is aware that her perceived positionality by students may be weaponised to delegitimise her intellectual contributions, invoking Fricker’s (Reference Fricker2009) concept of testimonial injustice:

Epistemic injustice (Fricker, Reference Fricker2009) is also evident with the institutionalised racialisation of legitimate knowledge as illustrated in the account below discussing decisions made by funders about ‘expertise’:

Debates about the democratisation of knowledge and contestation over notions of ‘expertise’ raise the issue of who holds the ‘authority’ to produce legitimate knowledge. Inherent in the concept of democracy is the notion of the critical citizen, challenging established norms, which is evident in de Tocqueville’s (Reference De Tocqueville1990; orig. Reference De Tocqueville1835) theorisations of American democracy. Expertise can be conceptualised in terms of acquired skills and knowledge through education and experience. In addition, the willingness to accept assessment and evaluation by others from a community of experts is conceived to be a part of a dynamic notion of expertise (Nichols, Reference Nichols2017). Nichols (Reference Nichols2017) laments the ‘death of expertise’ and derides the elevation of opinion over research-informed knowledge, where there is an elision between belief and knowledge. He argues that whilst there is an intellectual history of the relationship of expertise to authority, both the hostility to ‘knowledge’ and the belief that all opinions are valid are new. The question of presumed ‘authority’ is challenged regarding the practice of academics publicly commenting on issues outside their areas of expertise:

Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, has raised controversy for his views on race, gender, and Islam. In March 2019, the University of Cambridge rescinded his visiting Fellowship offer. Responding to concerns expressed by both students and faculty, a university spokesperson was quoted as stating: ‘[Cambridge] is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot’ (The Guardian, 2019). Rather than this being an infringement of academic freedom, the reference to the University of Cambridge ‘principles’ invokes Chemerinsky and Gillman’s (Reference Chemerinsky and Gillman2017) distinction of professional standards in the academic community from broader speech rights extending beyond into the community and Baer’s (Reference Baer2019) arguments for such principles being equivalent to rules and standards within the workplace.

Similarly, responsibility is invoked as a necessary basis for authority in the following account on the discipline of History:

There is a literature on the notion of lay expertise, which has developed in particular in the field of health and personal experiences of illness (Calnan and Williams, Reference Calnan and Williams1992; Prior, Reference Prior2002). Such experiential knowledge has increasingly been recognised as having legitimacy, with funding often requiring the participation of the public in research (Harris et al., Reference Harris, Croot, Thompson and Springett2015). Yet, it is argued that such lay ‘expertise’ is wholly experiential, and as such, the use of ‘expertise’ in conjunction with ‘lay’ has been seen as an oxymoron (Prior, Reference Prior2002). This leads us back to Goldman’s distinctions of the contested different conceptions of knowledge and notions of ‘truth’.

Contestations over legitimising different kinds of knowledge are also evident in debates surrounding indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge has been conceptualised as a ‘lived world, a form of reason that informs and sustains people … a bridge between human beings and their environments’ (Akena, Reference AlMaghlouth, Arvanitis, Cointet and Hanafi2015). The production of knowledge has also been studied in the field of social movements, including the affective production of knowledge (Kiwan, Reference Kiwan2017a). Here, such knowledge entails emancipation, is emotive, and is inter-subjective. Western knowledge is taken as ‘legitimate’ rational and objective knowledge, and in its colonial interactions, this knowledge has been universalised as legitimate over other forms of indigenous knowledge. The fluidity and dynamic nature of knowledge production necessarily entail its contextualisation. Akena (Reference Akena2012, p. 600), in examining the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge, argues that the social, economic, and political contextualisation of the knowledge producers within these colonial contexts elucidates the ‘domination and subjugation of indigenous knowledge’.

Working in the field of Native American Literature, a US Professor in Women’s Studies recounts her growing awareness of her positionality as a non-native scholar in the field whilst doing her PhD:

The issue of audience for this knowledge has implications for understanding academic freedom. Whilst noting that initially the assumption was that the primary audience would be her students, it unfolded that the anthology had a significant audience within Tribal communities, and in some instances, it was not deemed appropriate that some knowledge be shared outside the community:

7.3.2 University Diversity Initiatives

Diversity initiatives in UK and US contexts are a common feature in universities. In the United Kingdom, Athena SWAN was established in 2007 and is managed by the Equality Challenge Unit, with the stated purpose being to bring about structural and cultural change in higher education for women in the sciences, technology, engineering, maths, and medicine (STEMM). The scope of subjects expanded in 2015 to include arts and humanities, social sciences, and business and law; the geographical reach includes Ireland and a pilot in Australia (Tzanakou and Pearce, Reference Tzanakou and Pearce2019). Institutions can apply for recognition at three levels of award, namely bronze, silver, or gold. A version of this scheme was piloted in the United States, called SEA Change for STEM subjects, hosted with a non-governmental organisation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2022). In a similar vein, the UK (England, Scotland, and Wales) Race Equality Charter introduced in 2014 focuses on race equality, particularly in terms of representation of staff and students in higher education institutions, with thirty-one institutions involved in the trial. In 2022, universities expressed disapproval of government pressure to ‘reconsider membership of the race equality scheme’, in what has been characterised as culture wars, with the Minister of Education at that time describing the scheme as in tension with university duties to uphold free speech (The Guardian, 2022b). Less prominent, there is also a scheme relating to disability equality in the United Kingdom – ‘2 ticks’ – positive about disability symbol which is awarded to employers who have ‘made commitments to employ, keep and develop the abilities of disabled staff’ (UCU, 2016); there is also the UK Stonewall Diversity Champions, which is a programme for employers on sexual orientation including trans.

It has been argued that the UK Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) is ‘a product of neoliberalisation with the UK’s academic environments, reflecting the tendency towards accountability, metric, and the performative “doing” of equality work’ (Tzanakou and Pearce, Reference Tzanakou and Pearce2019, p. 1191). Given the market logic, such initiatives typically prioritise outcomes that take the form of extra support, rather than addressing systemic institutional barriers. Tzankou and Pearce (Reference Tzanakou and Pearce2019) use the construct of ‘moderate feminism’ to refer to an approach of ‘reasonableness’. This reasonableness invokes the dichotomy of rationality and emotion, where any affective response must be neutralised or contained as inappropriate. As such, this discourse does not recognise that emotion is actually a sociopolitical practice, rather an individual-level feeling (Ahmed, Reference Ahmed2014). In addition, this discourse is embedded in a marketised construction of individual competitiveness as opposed to social solidarity (Peck et al., Reference Peck, Theodore and Brenner2009). Furthermore, it is often those who are marginalised (typically women and ethnic minorities) who are tasked with the burden of this work (ibid., 2009). Below, a senior ethnic minority academic in the United Kingdom whose work focuses on race and who has also held ‘race equality’ roles elucidates the paradox of these initiatives:

Whilst ‘being allowed to spout off’, there is a concomitant undermining of legitimacy in that the dissemination of such knowledge is contained within sessions that ‘they never come to’. Furthermore, whilst such initiatives are supported, there is a lack of support in terms of funding, and hence the challenge in producing ‘strong research’ as opposed to being based on ‘our experiences in higher education’:

The construct of ‘strong research’ as opposed to experiential research further delegitimises those whose research is already marginalised. Disciplinary and methodological constructions of ‘quality’ consolidate this process of delegitimisation, discussed in the following section.

7.3.3 Disciplinary Quality, Methodology, and the ‘Canon’

Whilst semantically the understanding of ‘discipline’ as a noun describes content, it is pertinent to note that its origin stems from the verb form ‘to discipline’, corresponding to training in the methods associated with the content (Williams, Reference Williams2016). Scott (Reference Scott2019) comments on the role of disciplines as performing a protective function, yet concomitantly recognising that disciplinary structures are hierarchical and can act as a ‘regulatory tool’ (p. 49). Therefore, discipline denotes a ‘practice’, which can be inclined to ‘policing and punishment of non-conformist thought and action’ (Hudson, Reference Hudson, Hudson and Williams2016, p. 34). Conversely, interdisciplinarity transgresses disciplinary boundaries and has been linked to thinking ‘outside the box’ – ‘the activity of thinking – and its correlatives of teaching and research – exists precisely when one goes beyond the disciplinary’ (Docherty, Reference Hudson and Williams2016, pp. 102–103).

The concept of a self-regulating disciplinary community based on expertise arose in practice, emerging from this conceptual framework. Although the content and practices of a discipline are not static, they entail a recognition of the legitimacy of the shared norms of the discipline. If the disciplinary norms are transgressed, there is the threat of exclusion from the disciplinary community. Debates on the role of the disciplines in knowledge production, therefore, entail the issue of quality and methodological rigour and are used in discourses legitimising or delegitimising research.

The well-publicised case of Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, United States, is revisited. Her work on ‘rapid onset gender dysphoria’ came under attack from academic colleagues framed in terms of concern about the research design and data collection, where she was required to make post-publication amendments. The university posted a statement saying explicitly that the case was not about academic freedom, not because the research was deemed controversial, but rather because it was about ‘academic standards’ (Brown University, 2019). However, the context surrounding the case is highlighted in the following account, where scepticism over the discourse of ‘quality’ is evident:

Robert Plomin, Professor of Behavioural Genetics at King’s College, London, and author of Blue Print: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Reference Plomin2018), recounts that one of his greatest concerns in publishing his work was the reaction from academic colleagues, and that this has been the main reason for publishing his book at a much later stage in his career. He reflects on the challenges in publishing his work throughout his career. This was especially the case during the earlier career stages, and at a time when behavioural genetics in the discipline of Psychology was unpopular: ‘The extra hurdles you had to go through if you were studying something controversial. So, and also for publication, the research had to be a lot better to get it published, because people needed to be convinced – if you publish something saying the environment’s important, you know, no problem – everybody accepts that’ (p. 3).

Conversely, ‘quality’ is inferred from ‘legitimate’ evidence used to validate argument, as evident in the following account on legitimate historical evidence:

Similarly, quantitative research is associated with objectivity, neutrality, evidence, and truth and contrasted with qualitative research as political, subjective, partisan, and relative. As highlighted by Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2010, p. 272), statistics are ‘generally equated with scientific rigour and objectivity’. As discussed earlier in the chapter, quantitative research evidence is not excluded from the influence of assumptions and context. Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2010) warns of the dangers and responsibility of researchers in recognising the power of numbers and their influence on policy and practice.

Debates on disciplinary quality are also central to discourses on the ‘Canon’. The Canon is assumed to be a universal recognition of works of quality, based on ‘objectively’ agreed standards. Tracing the intellectual history of the disciplines, Williams (Reference Williams2016) notes that before the twentieth century, ‘liberal education’ consisted of humanities-related disciplines, based on the rationale and assumption that this approach best prepared men for elite leadership of the Empire. The legitimacy of religious foundations of knowledge was increasingly challenged through the Enlightenment with a shift towards secular knowledge.

The ‘Canon’ has been challenged by post-colonial, critical, and feminist theorists, with growing recognition of the sociopolitical and historical construction and positionality of knowledge and its embedded values (Arday and Mirza, Reference Aperio Bella, Seckelmann, Violini, Fraenkel-Haeberle and Ragone2018; Banks, Reference Banks1993; Giroux, Reference Giroux1983; Habermas, Reference Habermas1971). The recognition of the positionality and particularity of the ‘Canon’ is evidenced in various university initiatives on decolonising the curriculum. That the decolonisation of the curriculum entails a process of legitimating alternative ways of knowing, feeling, and thinking to address the epistemic violence of the Canon is recounted below:

7.3.4 Discourses of Civility

As discussed in the previous chapters, the concept of ‘civility’ has been used to discredit critique by focusing on how this critique is delivered. The critique of a large-scale externally funded UK-based project entitled ‘Ethics and Empire’ led by Nigel Biggar, Professor of Theology, University of Oxford, resulted in a heated expression of concern and frustration at the perceived controversial premise and aims of the project, its funding, and University of Oxford’s support, and hence legitimation for this work. The interdisciplinary project aims to develop a ‘Christian ethics of empire’. On asking Professor Biggar if he felt that his academic freedom had been infringed, he focused on the ways in which the critique had been delivered and its lack of civility:

The high-profile case of Stephen Salaita has led to debate regarding ‘civility’ and its relationship to academic freedom. As mentioned previously, Stephen Salaita had been offered an academic position of employment at the University of Illinois as a Professor of Native American Studies which was subsequently withdrawn, as a result of university donor objections to Salaita’s tweets criticising Israel and Zionism in the context of a fifty-one-day Israeli military assault of Gaza. His offer was rescinded by the chancellor in August 2014 presented in terms of civility: ‘What we cannot and will not tolerate at the University of Illinois are personal and disrespectful words or actions that demean and abuse either viewpoints themselves or those who express them’ (Moshman and Edler, Reference Moshman and Edler2015). The statement notes that in the US context, ‘uncivil’ speech is protected in law by the First Amendment, although not in educational contexts. Whilst there is no legal requirement for civility, nor sanctions against it, it was argued that civility creates a supportive respectful learning environment ideally modelled by academic faculty.

Yet, Salaita (Reference Salaita2015a) defends the use of incivility, claiming incivility is the only civilised response to barbarity. Arguing for the importance of contextualising the positionality of the incivility, Salaita elaborates: ‘My tweets might appear uncivil, but such a judgment cannot be made in an ideological or rhetorical vacuum. Insofar as “civil” is profoundly racialised and has a long history of demanding conformity, I frequently choose incivility as a form of communication. This choice is both moral and rhetorical.’ Puar (Reference Puar2015, pp. 64–65) argues that certain bodies are deemed disposed to incivility, and as such, it is not just an issue of the incivility of linguistic expression, but rather that the ‘ideological evaluation of speech is used to reinforce the production of certain bodies as threatening, dangerous, and uncivil’. Puar highlights the contrasting language used in the Charlie Hebdo case, where rather than a discourse of the ‘incivility’ of Islamophobic cartoons, it is referred to as ‘political satire’.

It is argued that the history of the discourse of incivility has operated as a form of ‘racial and class denouncement’ in US and European contexts since the nineteenth century (Massad, Reference Massad2014). The binary of civility/incivility can be seen as a more politically correct yet masked reformulation of the cultured/uncultured binary which is ‘openly colonial’; it is relevant to note that ‘civil’ derives from civilization, with its settler-colonial and imperial legacies (Salaita, 2015a). Tracing the use of discourses of incivility used against Eastern European Jews’ perceived lack of assimilation in the United States, Massad (Reference Massad2014) draws a parallel with the case of Steven Salaita and, indeed, the challenges he himself has faced whilst at Columbia University, with concerns – expressed also by Arab-American colleagues pertaining to his ‘vulgar Arab incivility’ and ‘immoderation’. He contrasts this reaction with the support from his ‘liberal Jewish colleagues who gave [him] their unequivocal support and showed no discernible concern about the question of “civility”’(Massad, Reference Massad2014). This positionality not only is a historical position but also continues into the contemporary lived context of various forms of discrimination, as Salaita tweeted on 21 June 2019: ‘Because “civility” compels people to work with racial segregationists, corporate hacks, colonial settlers, sexual predators, and war criminals, I’ll go ahead and proudly remain uncivil’ (@stevesalaita, Reference Salaita2019). The discourse of civility also reflects assumptions of the rationality and objectivity of knowledge, as opposed to experiential, subjective, or affective constructions of knowledge. As such, the use of the term ‘civility’ excludes and delegitimates such knowledge.

Related to discourses of civility, the terms ‘snowflakes’ and ‘wokeness’ are used to delegitimate any critiques of dominant forms of knowledge production. It is commonly argued that the political left wing is limiting academic freedom, with its concerns relating to ‘controversial’ speakers or research projects or unnecessarily protecting ‘oversensitive’ students. Furedi (Reference Furedi2017) refers to the ‘therapeutic’ construction of education and society and the infantilisation of young adult students; he critiques ‘trigger warnings’, concerns of protecting minorities from hate speech and calls to decolonise the curriculum and the established centuries-old canon, as illegitimate attacks on academic freedom. This discourse is predicated on the abstraction of knowledge from the existing power relations between groups and its sociopolitical context, and instead assuming the neutrality and equality of different knowledges, as if on a ‘level playing field’. In contrast, the importance of historicising power relations is elucidated in the account below:

7.3.5 Skills, Employment, and Research Assessment

As discussed in the previous chapters, neoliberal and market pressures on higher education are evident in the dominant functionalist interrelated discourses of skills, education for employment, and research impact. That this is a widespread globalised discourse is commented on:

The internationalisation and privatisation of higher education globally drive a logic of the monetary worth of qualifications and the operationalisation of a qualification into employment and earning power. This impacts the perceived legitimacy of those humanities and social sciences disciplines compared to professional degrees. Whilst the discourse of skills and employment is a global one, in the Arab world it is particularly dominant given that most universities do not have a liberal arts–based requirement. In contrast, in the US context, typically professional degrees at high-status institutions have liberal arts requirements, thus providing a form of legitimation for such knowledge.

The governance of research in the Arab world is typically centrally organised through government ministries of education, although in Lebanon, which is a highly decentralised system, this governance is managed by an independent council; this is also the case for the UAE, although its governance is described as ‘trade-oriented’ (Hanafi and Arvanitis, Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015). The UAE scores the highest for innovation in the region, with Lebanon scoring significantly lower (ibid., 2015), measured using a World Bank Global Innovation Index. The World Bank has also devised a Knowledge Economy Index which ranks the highest in the UAE, championing the UAE as a model for the future based on the liberalisation of the economy, privatisation, entrepreneurship, innovation, and less state control (Hanafi and Arvanitis, Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015). Of note is that Lebanon, with a more established research tradition, does not perform well on the Knowledge Economy Index. Hanafi and Arvanitis (Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015) question the ‘objectivity’ of the index and advocate a more diversified model.

This emphasis on skills for employment is also reflected in terms of funding of teaching programmes and research. This is evident in the example of the UK Research Evaluation Framework (REF) as noted in Chapter 5. The REF is a national assessment exercise of research ‘quality’ upon which funding of universities is decided, the concept of ‘impact’ is prioritized, and research meeting these criteria is legitimated. The REF has been critiqued as a manifestation of the ‘neoliberal audit culture that infests universities’ and a form of governance to ensure ‘appropriate returns’ on public investment (MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2017, p. 706). It has also been critiqued that it curtails creativity through constraining research to produce narrow outcomes (Watermeyer, Reference Watermeyer2016). The REF illustrates both the commodification and the regulation of universities (Burawoy, Reference Burawoy and Holmwood2011). The REF and the impact agenda act as a legitimising or delegitimising mechanism shaping what research is conducted. The rise of systematic research reviews supporting evidence-informed policymaking in education illustrates this logic, where knowledge is produced to meet the aims determined by policymakers. In this framework, knowledge is ‘beholden to the strategic and technocratic frameworks’ of the research councils and government (Watermeyer, Reference Watermeyer2016). A UK Professor of Sociology comments on how the discipline of Sociology has been shaped and delegitimated by the REF and impact agenda:

This account illustrates the shift to legitimating more applied constructions of the discipline that are topic based and related to policy, such as health and influence by more behavioural disciplines.

7.3.6 Funding and International Partnerships

International networks and ‘North–South’ partnerships have gained prominence in social science funding over the last two decades. This rationale supports the participation of relatively marginalised partners in co-constructing research agendas and building research capacity in the Global South. Yet, it has been argued that there is still the ‘fundamental problem’ that the Global South provides the data but does not usually set the theoretical or research agendas, which is central in the larger social process of knowledge production (Connell, Reference Connell2014). A number of interviewees commented on the political use of transnational partnerships to legitimise knowledge, through institutionalised research council grant requirements: ‘There are research agendas and when you are collaborating with the UK or the US, by the fashion you are collaborating with, I mean, with people who have many more resources, you know, larger institutions, a larger number of researchers and so on and quite often what they are looking for is a token local partner’ (former AUB Professor, Lebanon, p. 8).

In the field of migration research, international networks and North–South partnerships are requirements for funding. The objectives for such funding schemes entail the inclusive production of knowledge and building regional research capacity in the Global South. Whilst laudable objectives, the structural constraints and historical power relations expose the inequalities between North and South and inadvertently may be reified (Landau, Reference Landau2012). In addition, the agenda of impact and addressing global challenges direct the nature of research towards policy-driven research, and so research councils retain the authority over funding and the legitimation of research (Landau, Reference Landau2012). The ‘business of refugees’ is used to describe the legitimated policy-driven research on refugees: ‘The business of refugees, you know, it became a business and there are literally hundreds of NGOs and so on and there is a card that goes to the locals and, you know, quite a bit of the money, the funds go to international NGOs and so on. So it becomes a business’ (former AUB Professor, Lebanon, p. 9).

Indeed, Hanafi (Reference Hanafi, Burawoy, Chang and Hseih2010) has illustrated how international sources of research funding in the region have channelled social science research away from higher education institutions and towards policy-oriented consultancies. Yet, he notes that European Union (EU) funding schemes in the region have been a relative success with 300 million euros spent on research in the region between 2007 and 2013 (Hanafi and Arvanitis, Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015). In Lebanon, in particular, international research collaborations have increased particularly with European partners, with co-publications increasing from 22 percent in 1987 to 55 percent in 2006 (ibid., 2015). In examining research collaboration across the region, looking at the Qatar National Research Fund, less than 15 percent are with collaborators in the Arab world, and there is also little within-country collaboration (ibid., 2015).

Whilst there have been efforts to respond to critiques of unequal partnerships, the focus has been relatively more on the implementation and dissemination of research, rather than interrogating processes of agenda setting and research governance (Fransman and Newman, Reference Fransman and Newman2019). As such, the practice of partnerships is the focus, rather than examining epistemological conceptions and the political economy of knowledge. There have been calls for partnerships between the Global North and Global South to be understood as ethical concerns. Walsh et al. (Reference Walsh, Brugha and Byrne2016) note that typically broader power relations are not treated as an ethics concern in the field of health research, and they propose a Bourdieusian lens to understand North–South inequalities in research collaborations. They use Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to explore the legacy of colonialism in North–South partnerships and the maintenance and legitimacy of the status quo; considering economic, symbolic, and scientific capital, they also critically examine funding arrangements.

These structural and economic inequalities between North and South impede competing on a level playing for large-scale EU and US grants, which can be understood in terms of discrepancies in ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’:

The politics of research that does not even get funding is raised in the account below, referred to as ‘neglected diseases’. This term in itself illustrates that it is recognised that research is not being conducted on these diseases despite sizeable populations suffering:

This illustrates the politicisation of global funding, where funding is available for those diseases affecting populations in the Global North as opposed to those in the Global South, where there is not deemed to be a market for the development of treatments arising from such research. As a result, the marketisation of the application of such research delegitimises the perceived need to undertake this research.

7.3.7 Global Legitimating Systems

Global university rankings play an important role in higher education, in spite of having been critiqued as part of the neoliberal and audit culture (Ball and Olmedo, Reference Ball and Olmedo2013) and of succumbing to the rise of metrics and data (Lim, Reference Lim2018). In examining the practices of various ranking systems, Lim (Reference Lim2018) argues that the processes of legitimation entail using ‘hard’ data such as bibliometrics and also input from a range of stakeholders including students. The interactions with stakeholders are the means by which audience ‘trust’ is built for the ranking system – in effect, the legitimation of their knowledge. Contestation over university rankings entails, firstly, a methodological debate about the reliability of such rankings. It has been argued that objective ranking systems cannot exist as they necessarily entail ‘adding up a converted value by means of an a priori (e.g. subjectively) assumed system of weighting’ (Rocki, Reference Rocki2005, p. 179). As such, the legitimacy of rankings is questioned. In addition, it is important to contextualise the increased use of university rankings in relation to the globalisation and massification of higher education and the marketised logic of the student as ‘customer’. There is also contestation over what constitutes a ‘good’ university.

Turner (Reference Turner2008) analysed various university ranking systems and identified that many UK higher education institutions, which did not appear in the top 200 global ranking, performed better than Oxford and Cambridge on national rankings. He gives the example of the University of Lancaster and University of York, which were very effective at converting input into research outputs – in effect, a type of ‘value-added’ score. However, many universities in Europe and the Asian Pacific have adjusted their strategic objectives to meet the criteria of ‘world-class’ universities as defined by the global rankings methodology. This heightened legitimacy does not take into account the significant inequalities in resources between universities in the Global North and Global South. Jons and Hoyler (Reference Jons and Hoyler2013) illustrate that the global circulation of knowledge aligns with Anglo-American publication cultures and publishing in the English language. However, they identify the emergence of new ‘knowledge’ hubs’ which increasingly may have significant transnational influence in the production of knowledge. They argue that the partiality of such global ranking systems undermines their authority and legitimacy, and that ‘other measures and subject-specific perspectives would produce very different geographies’ (Jons and Hoyler, Reference Jons and Hoyler2013, p. 57).

There is a significant literature on the international division of knowledge labour between the Global North and the Global South, whereby Northern scholars in North–South collaborations have outcomes of publishable knowledge, whilst Southern scholars play more of a role of ‘sub-contractors’ (Kreimer and Zabala, Reference Kreimer and Zabala2008). Collyer (Reference Collyer2018, p. 57) reminds us that ‘knowledge is not just a product of individual knowledge-makers’, but rather it entails ‘systematic boundaries and mechanisms of exclusion across and between countries and regions of the world’. Furthermore, whilst scholarship in the Global North tends to claim universality, scholarship in the Global South typically locates the research in context (Baber, Reference Baber2003). Citation practices also diverge, with the Global North showing patterns of self-citation, with rare citation of Southern scholars by Northern scholars (Collyer, Reference Collyer2018). In contrast, Southern scholars are outward looking in their citation practices. Such differences in publication and citation practices reify and consolidate the inequalities in transnational knowledge production. This politics of citation has been critiqued by critical feminist and anti-racists scholars in the Global North, who argue that current practices of citation consolidate ‘the continued hegemony of white heteromasculine knowledge production’ and the marginalisation and delegitimation of ‘subaltern and otherwise othered populations’ (Mott and Cockayne, Reference Mott and Cockayne2017, pp. 956–958).

An example of this can be seen in the study of who were the dominant knowledge producers on knowledge of the ‘Arab Spring’ (AlMaghlouth et al., Reference AlMaghlouth, Arvanitis, Cointet and Hanafi2015). In a network analysis, it was found that the majority of published articles on the topic (75 percent) were from outside the Arab region, with 30 percent accounted for by US authors. Furthermore, of those articles published within the region, there was a slight majority published in Arabic, thus constraining it to a more domestic audience. Furthermore, the majority of publications are located with the disciplines of political science/international relations, with only 14 percent being based on field research. AlMaghlouth et al. (Reference AlMaghlouth, Arvanitis, Cointet and Hanafi2015) conclude that there is a hierarchy of three levels of knowledge production; first, authors with the greatest ‘legitimacy’ are from the US Ivy league universities considered to be ‘experts’ given their theoretical expertise; second, there are less-cited scholars in spite of their scholarly expertise – often local scholars or French-speaking scholars; and third, there are those scholars writing in Arabic from the region. Whilst the third level in the hierarchy cites the authors in the first level of the hierarchy, those authors from outside the region rarely cite the local experts, thus delegitimising their knowledge on the global stage.

However, examining the distribution of academic knowledge production, there has been a shift towards a ‘non-English speaking periphery’ in Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, and China; as such, this reflects a shift from a centre-periphery model to a more multi-polar model of knowledge production (Hanafi and Arvanitis, Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015, p. 88), challenging this epistemic injustice (Fricker, Reference Fricker2009). Yet, the publication output of the Arab world remains low: ‘Now in terms of the production of knowledge, there is a lack of accurate figures. So there is less investment, there is less production, I mean, we could look at number of dissertations produced, whenever there are records, you know, for some of the largest universities, I mean, we are not even talking here about quality. It’s quite dismal’ (former Professor, AUB, Lebanon, pp. 2–3).

However, Hanafi and Arvanitis (Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015) have shown that the rate of growth over the last two decades are above world averages and comparable to the emerging powers of Chile, South Africa, and Thailand. They make the case for the region being an emerging knowledge producer, with Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan contributing to this, as well as huge growth in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Yet, citations of publications in the region are low, excluding the role of a language effect. Whilst impact cannot be inferred from citation, influence, recognition, and status within the academic community are invoked by such measures. As such, citation confers legitimacy. Composite H-index calculations by country are low for the region; however, Lebanon and the UAE score fourth and fifth in the region, respectively (109 and 100, respectively), compared to 943 and 1,518 for the United States and United Kingdom, respectively, for the period 1996–2013 (Hanafi and Arvanitis, Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015). Legitimacy also comes from publishing in internationally recognised journals, rather than local journals, and can at least account in part for relatively few academic books published in Arabic geared towards a local audience (Hanafi, Reference Hanafi, Burawoy, Chang and Hseih2010). Hanafi and Arvanitis (Reference Hanafi and Arvanitis2015) analysed publication databases for publications produced at the American University of Beirut, and they illustrated that 68 percent of knowledge is invisible to international audiences. This also impacts the world rankings of universities, as this knowledge is invisible.