RT Article
T1 Rich scholar, poor scholar: inequalities in research capacity, “knowledge” abysses, and the value of unconventional approaches to research
JF Crime, law and social change
VO 81
IS 5
SP 469
OP 488
A1 Rodríguez Goyes, David
A2 Skilbrei, May-Len
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1906802564
AB The dominance of modern rationality in knowledge production implies that the distribution of intellectual capital highly depends on the capacity to gather representative data and generate generalizable theses. Furthermore, as research becomes more formalized and dominated by large funding schemes, intellectual capital allocation is increasingly associated with high economic, labor force and institutional power. This phenomenon has consequences at the global level. As the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has documented, there are significant disparities between countries in research capacities, with a marked difference between “core” countries with semi-monopolies over sanctioned knowledge production and “peripheral” states primarily used as data mines. The core–periphery divide in research capacity brings about what decolonial theorists call knowledge abysses: the widespread idea that core countries are the ultimate knowledge producers and thus the legitimate guides in humanity’s road to “progress.” In that context, the democratization of knowledge and the prevention of neo-colonial dynamics require the development of cheaper and more accessible ways of collecting representative data. In this article, we make a call for innovations in methods that can serve to overcome this, and we illustrate possible avenues for achieving sound research without incurring high financial costs by describing and discussing our experiences in researching narco-violence in Colombia and prostitution in Russia with what we call the “taxi method.”
NO Literaturverzeichnis: Seite 485-488
K1 Core-periphery
K1 Democratization of knowledge
K1 intellectual capital
K1 Inequality
K1 Research capacity
K1 Research Methods
DO 10.1007/s10611-023-10105-x