by Dina Zoe Belluigi
‘Research cultures’, and their problematics, have received sufficient attention to have been delineated various definitions by authoritative groups within the university/ research ecology in the United Kingdom, and amongst scholars in our field of enquiry. Raising questions about ethicality within research cultures, in a recent paper I explored dys/consciousness and its effects on research production and the formation of academic researchers. The focus of the empirical component was on one part which falls within the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland (NI).
How to conceptualise thinking and seeing for the study of UK universities?
The paper begins with a mapping of conceptualisations of consciousness. It does so through their application, by those who have studied dynamics of racism in universities and educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA. The mapping includes scholars’ arguments about the persistence of not unconscious but dysconscious racism, the limits of critical consciousness, the necessity for anti-racism, and the constraints to realising decolonisation, when faced with janiform approaches to structural, institutional and scientific racism in academia.
Methodological approach
The conceptual mapping served as a sensitisation device through which to explore academic research cultures, about enquiry on social groups who were and are marginalised due to perceptions of their ‘otherness’ to dominantly-placed Northern Irish groups. Difference is indexed through constructions of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘migration’, underpinned by whiteness.
A Critical Discourse Analysis, undergirded by Critical Race Theory, was undertaken of 200 published research items that related to this area of enquiry, which were found to extend from 1994 to 2022, and were spread across disciplines. These were sourced from the repositories of the research-intensive universities in Northern Ireland. Qualitative reflections enriched the analysis. These included the participation of the related academic-authors, and report-and-respond insights from institutional research officers, and non-academic partners of such studies (n=37). Combining these sources was to probe more deeply the ways in which such outlier practices of knowledge production reinforced, evaded or resisted dominant frames and norms of conduct.
Signs of dysconsciousness
The paper’s analysis unpacks 5 signs of what was interpreted as dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism in the context. The first sign was the under-study and under-funding of local research enquiry on/ about/ and by so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’. Secondly, were the skewed dynamics within the politics of participation and of authorship, wherein those studied were rarely positioned as authorities of knowledge produced. Thirdly, the ethicality of authors’ interests and motivations in undertaking such research were found to be complicated and undermined by strategic, and often self-serving, goals imposed by the academic research ecology. Problematics in the data collected and held by public authorities, was the fourth sign. The article culminates in the fifth sign: that the threats of risk, social sanction and double-speak related to such research, were not only exogenous to universities, but endogenous too.
Insights for further explorations
In the current neoliberal milieu, the enablers of research – such as funding, social validation or career rewards – were of such a techno-rational nature that the depth of theorisation, complexity and intellectual debate necessary to challenge the existing dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism remained under-supported. Moreover, the article confirms observations that – rather than enrich or catalyse criticality and plurality within the dominant formations of academic knowledge and of scholars – risk-avoidance of (perceived) controversial issues is compounded when institutions are situated within complicated local socio-political conditions. This places limits on, and indeed de-idealises, promotional social responsibility imaging of ‘anchor’ universities.
Participants’ counter-narratives provided insights about the production of enquiry despite, and in some cases because of, such dominant dynamics. Of interest is that many of the authors were women (in far higher proportions than the staff composition of those institutions); and many of the authors self-identified as migrant academics. In addition to external migrants to the British Isles, this included those from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, providing a sense of how alienated ‘outsiders’ were often made to feel within that academic ‘community’. Avoiding hero narratives, the article points to the politics of authorial agency within academic practices when individuals negotiate insider-outsider, minority-majority dynamics of academic research cultures hostile to such enquiry.
The article concludes by raising questions about the mantle of ethical responsibility to justice, truth, and dissent within such constraining, homogenising conditions. While it is tempting to read this as an exceptional or peculiar case, references to related studies are included throughout the article to demonstrate that similar problematic dynamics within research cultures have been observed across university spaces in the Global North, and warrant further enquiry.
Professor Belluigi is a Council member of SRHE; Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation at Queen’s University Belfast; and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.