It is increasingly expected - just about everywhere - that you will raise external grants to do your research. In my 'official' discipline, people mine useless data endlessly and esp in Com Pols many never actually go to the countries that they are discussing. Makes for very precise but very useless research articles. I think your comments about resources of northern v southern scholars are very apt (obvs).
Yes. I think essentially social science and humanities research is defaulting to a "buy data that is created elsewhere that doesn't measure most of what actually matters or determines outcomes in the place the data is about". Scholars studying Africa have been dealing with that for a long time--analyses of formal politics that have almost nothing to do with the reality of political outcomes in the countries in question, analyses of formal economies that say nothing about the economic activities of almost the entire population because that's not measured in the official data.
In the context of US and EU universities retreating from a Cold War funding structure that was invested in underwriting northern presence in southern societies--in part because the soft power logic of a lot of the Cold War privileged building real social networks and actual material knowledge, not the least because the US and USSR as states knew almost fuck-all nothing about most of the world--it might be exactly the moment to say "ok, knowledge production about places should be done by the people in those places, or by mobile cosmopolitans who have home roots in those places and thus can afford long residential engagements in them". But then that would take academic institutions in the US and EU taking situated, local knowledge production seriously, and it would take institutions in the rest of the world actually investing in knowledge production that wasn't just about fluffing some dictator's vainglory.
Caveat to my responses: Speaking of my former career as an anthropologist with historical leanings. Retirement, for me, includes retirement from long-term field studies.
I'm as interested in what has been the norm over the long haul of the last 40+ years--I suspect we passed from an era where universities indulgently covered these costs, Title VI helped in many cases, and where the cost of living in much of the developing world also meant that US and European researchers found that their own resources carried them a long way. (But even in that sense I'm still curious therefore about what historians and literary critics working in England in 1980, etc. did, if they didn't have a friend or relative to crash with or weren't resident themselves.)
You know, that's also a thing: dorms were available for researchers and conference-goers way more often in the 80s and 90s, I think. Not sure why that stopped.
It is increasingly expected - just about everywhere - that you will raise external grants to do your research. In my 'official' discipline, people mine useless data endlessly and esp in Com Pols many never actually go to the countries that they are discussing. Makes for very precise but very useless research articles. I think your comments about resources of northern v southern scholars are very apt (obvs).
Yes. I think essentially social science and humanities research is defaulting to a "buy data that is created elsewhere that doesn't measure most of what actually matters or determines outcomes in the place the data is about". Scholars studying Africa have been dealing with that for a long time--analyses of formal politics that have almost nothing to do with the reality of political outcomes in the countries in question, analyses of formal economies that say nothing about the economic activities of almost the entire population because that's not measured in the official data.
In the context of US and EU universities retreating from a Cold War funding structure that was invested in underwriting northern presence in southern societies--in part because the soft power logic of a lot of the Cold War privileged building real social networks and actual material knowledge, not the least because the US and USSR as states knew almost fuck-all nothing about most of the world--it might be exactly the moment to say "ok, knowledge production about places should be done by the people in those places, or by mobile cosmopolitans who have home roots in those places and thus can afford long residential engagements in them". But then that would take academic institutions in the US and EU taking situated, local knowledge production seriously, and it would take institutions in the rest of the world actually investing in knowledge production that wasn't just about fluffing some dictator's vainglory.
Caveat to my responses: Speaking of my former career as an anthropologist with historical leanings. Retirement, for me, includes retirement from long-term field studies.
I'm as interested in what has been the norm over the long haul of the last 40+ years--I suspect we passed from an era where universities indulgently covered these costs, Title VI helped in many cases, and where the cost of living in much of the developing world also meant that US and European researchers found that their own resources carried them a long way. (But even in that sense I'm still curious therefore about what historians and literary critics working in England in 1980, etc. did, if they didn't have a friend or relative to crash with or weren't resident themselves.)
In the 90s, I spent two weeks living in a dorm at the University of Birmingham while I was doing research in the CMS archives the
there. My college research kitty paid for that and for my plane ticket. Halcyon days.
You know, that's also a thing: dorms were available for researchers and conference-goers way more often in the 80s and 90s, I think. Not sure why that stopped.