Silencing and Marginalization of Facilitating Researchers from the Global South: Analyzing the role of Academic Institutions and Norms

There has been an upsurge of interest in questions around research ethics in field-research in recent years, some of which touch upon the role and situation of what we in this project term “facilitating researchers”, otherwise referred to as “local research assistants” in the Global South.

Yet, this literature is mainly descriptive, written by contracting researchers of the Global North, with limited analysis of the wider institutional structures reproducing a continued silencing and poor working conditions of facilitating researchers.

Building upon insights from a recently completed project, which included facilitating researchers in three settings (DR Congo, Sierra Leone and Jharkhand, India), this project aims to contribute to further knowledge about the role that academic institutions, mainly but not only, in the Global North play in the silencing and poor working conditions of facilitating researchers.

It includes an analysis of research funding bodies, ethics committees, universities and publishers in Sweden, the UK, France and India, focusing on the role of knowledge, prejudice, academic conventions and administrative rules and regulations.

The project draws on insights both from the wider literature on inequalities in North-South knowledge production as well as literature addressing organization, incentives and conventions in academia more generally. It will be conducted through a combination of a correspondance experiment, in-depth interviews and text analysis.