What does it mean to be an academic in different parts of the world? What comes along as the same job description – a bundle of teaching, research, and impact tasks – varies enormously from place to place. Not only the financial conditions of universities differ, but also the social standing of researchers. This is probably what one needs to expect in a world shaped by inequalities along so many lines – geopolitical power, financial resources, cultural influence, race, gender etc. But arguably, there are additional problems within academia. For example, certain academic centers, typically situated in the Global North, dominate the discourse in whole fields, and the opportunities to gain international visibility are distributed very unevenly across countries.
Last summer, I had written on this lack of Global Science Equity. It is problematic for at least two reasons. The first is moral: some of the global inequities are so stark that they stand in blatant contrast to the meritocratic rhetoric still widely used within academia. When being situated in favorable circumstances gets framed as “talent” or “excellence,” and being from a disadvantaged country as “lacking quality,” this is an unjust distortion of the facts, which leads to misguided distributions of respect and recognition across academics worldwide.* The second is epistemic: academic research works best if diverse perspectives and approaches are taken into account, not if there are steep status hierarchies and historically grown centres of gravity that determine what research gets done and under which paradigms.