When I lived in Abu Dhabi, I once visited a university in another Middle Eastern country. As part of the visit I did a guest lecture about my research, I met with colleagues to discuss our joint research interests and collaboration opportunities, and … I had to fill in a report form about my person and my visit for the local bureaucracy. In the spot for “Affiliation” I put down “Zayed University,” the UAE university I was affiliated with. As I did so, the admin officer who was looking over my shoulder, said to my hosts “I thought she’s from Australia.” Ooops! Everyone seemed to think I was an impostor and for a moment I felt like one. Then, one of my hosts kindly asked me to replace “Zayed University, Abu Dhabi” with “Macquarie University, Sydney” because that was “much more prestigious with the higher-ups.”
I was reminded of this little episode where my value as a visiting academic seemed to lie more in the fact that I was affiliated with a Western institution than anything else I might have had to offer when I read Esmat Babaii’s recent article about “self-marginalization.” In the tradition of postcolonial criticism, the researcher examines how the colonial cringe plays out in academia. If you thought that the colonial cringe is a thing of the past, or that academics are less likely to be affected than other members of post-colonial/non-Western/peripheral societies, think again!
The method used by Babaii to make her point is ingenious: a discourse analysis of bio-blurbs published in a conference booklet. The conference was Asia TEFL 2006 and after discarding the bio-blurbs of keynote speakers and Western academics, she was left with a corpus of 512 bio-blurbs of academics from Arab countries, Iran, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, China and Japan. This corpus was analyzed for any evidence of “self-marginalization,” i.e. evidence that the authors down-played their local credentials and highlighted connections with the West, even if those were tenuous at best.
For instance, she found that academics with a PhD from a non-Western university rarely provided the institution where they had obtained their PhD in their bio-blurb – in contrast to presenters who had obtained their PhD from a Western institution. This also worked by association: if presenters were affiliated with or supervised by someone who had a PhD from a Western institution, that information was likely to be shared in the bio-blurb. Some of the bio-blurbs quoted in the paper mention connections to Western institutions so minor and seemingly irrelevant (e.g., having attended a conference in the USA; having attended a short-term study-tour) that they seem almost comical. If a local career of 20 years is mentioned in less detail than having “once” taught a course in the UK for a semester, as in one example, one cannot help but feel sorry for that academic.
Babaii concludes her study by comparing academics who exercise self-marginalization to strike-breakers:
Periphery academics who exercise self-marginalization, similar to strike-breakers, slow down, and sometimes, nullify the efforts on the part of those independent scholars who try to resist the ‘imposed identities’ […] in the world of professionalism dominated by Western ethos.
The paper is a call to take a long and hard look at the internationalization of higher education: is the global community of scholars and scientists just another colonial system that institutionalizes subjectivities of inferiority in its peripheries?
Reference
Esmat Babaii (2010). Opting Out or Playing the ‘Academic Game’? Professional Identity Construction by Off-Center Academics Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 4 (1), 93-105
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It is all a reminiscence of Dr. Koorosh Safavi to me, when he was trying to answer this question: Why have we, “Southern Countries”, stopped thinking and producing knowledge?
In providing an answer to this question he goes back to the 15th century and the discovery of the new continent and the starting point of colonialism, in fact. He calls this stage “micro-colonialism” as opposed to “macro-colonialism” (his own terms are “استعمار خرد” and “استعمار کلان”). It is micro-colonialism as both the colonized and the colonizer are aware of the fact of being what they are. Then, after the first and second world wars, a group of European scholars immigrated to the U.S. due to a number of reasons. This event turned the U.S. to a “global” area, paving the way for what is called “globalization” today and this is “macro-colonialism”, as neither the colonizer knows where his colonies are, nor the colonized knows under whose colony he is.
Then, he gives some examples to show our resignation to those imposed global rules, to show we have stopped thinking! One is that of I.S.I standards; that a private institution in the U.S. has assigned some norms; that they rated the universities throughout the world based on their own standards and no Iranian university is listed among the top one hundred ones. Then, the Ministry of Science issues a declaration announcing the academic articles from now on should meet their requirements, and no one says that way 50% of an Iranian researcher’s scientific article MUST be the westerns’ quotations! Instead, it becomes prestigious to have such articles; it becomes a yardstick for giving raise to our academia!
He believes that these are not our real problems! The real problem arises when we start “internalizing” this kind of globalization; when we start resigning ourselves to macro-colonialism without even being aware of it! And this unawareness of the imposing nature of these global rules gives the Western Countries the right and chance to think, leaving Others thinking on their thoughts!
صفوی. ک. (١٣٨٦). چرا دیگر نمی اندیشیم. بخارا، ٦٣، ١٢٩-١٢٦.
zohreh
You’re absolutely right, Dave W., but that’s just the point. All academics everywhere have a tendency to play down the less prestigious aspects of their career in favour of experiences or affiliations they suppose their readers/listeners will be more impressed by. The question is, are readers more impressed by Western credentials? If so, why? Are they in fact better institutions? And if not, why do suppose they are, enough to make them de-emphasize their non-Western experience? Therein lies the colonial aspect, and it’s central. Not to whether academics drastically underline the highlights of their careers, but to why non-Western experience is not considered as much of a highlight as a single course taught at Oxford.
Ill bet this phenomenon isnt confined to non-Western schools. Ive seen plenty of anecdotal cases where this same thing has occurred in completely Western (i.e., United States) contexts—omitting the name of non-prestige schools where the scholar got their degree, playing up participation in extension and short programs offered by elite schools, referencing a single lecture given at an Ivy League school in their bio, etc.
While there is undoubtedly a colonial aspect to the issue when it comes to the developing world, Im not sure the fundamental issue is related to that. The drive is that there is academic capital to be had by associating oneself with elite or prestige schools, regardless of where those schools are located.
Dr. Babaii’s article is, beyond shadow of a doubt, worthy of fastidious contemplation. I am not versed in what happens in the other countries mentioned in the article, but as far as one of them, Iran, is concerned, I am of the opinion that this inclination to idolize the west and what has even the least trace of ‘being western’, has its roots in those so-called Iranian intellectuals whose main aspiration was to entice the populace to accredit the other (the west) and to marginalize or to denounce the self. I think this movement started by the so-called thinkers such as Mirza Malkam Khan (1833–1908) and was later entrenched through the Pahlavi Dynasty. Mirza Malkam Khan was Iran’s ambassador to Great
Britain where he launched a pamphlet titled Qanun (Law) in which he advocated a solution for the Iranians: the acquisition of Western Civilization without any Iranian revisions!
I label this a social disease, which has not been yet methodically approached. I think this “global community of the so-called intellectuals” has long paved the way for the colonial system of the West “to institutionalize subjectivities of inferiority in its peripheries.”
Interesting… Re academics with a PhD from a non-Western university rarely provided the institution where they had obtained their PhD in their bio-blurb: If the institution wasnt named, how did the researcher know the PhD was from a non-Western university, I wonder? Its hard (but often very useful) to research *absence* of data.