This article aims to offer some thoughts that go beyond mere bibliometric and scientometric evidence, by empirically and comparatively exploring the conditions for, and the experiences of research and international research collaboration of African PhD holders who graduated with support from development cooperation/aid. The article explores the constraints on research, international research mobility and collaboration, at the intersection of development cooperation and global science regimes. Taking Swedish development cooperation as an example, the article focuses on preconditions and constraints that scholars from Mozambique and Tanzania, in their current positions, experience in their research, with special attention on international mobility and cooperation.

Cet article a pour objectif de proposer des réflexions qui dépassent les simples preuves bibliométriques et scientométriques, en explorant empiriquement et comparativement les expériences de recherche et de collaborations scientifques internationales de docteurs africains ayant reçu une aide au développement pour leur doctorat. Cet article explore les limites auxquelles se heurtent la recherche, la mobilité internationale et la coopération scientifque internationale, à l’intersection entre la coopération au développement et les programmes scientifques mondiaux. En prenant pour exemple la coopération au développement suédoise, cet article se focalise sur les conditions et les contraintes que les académiques du Mozambique et de Tanzanie, au sein de leur emploi actuel, rencontrent dans le cadre de leur recherche, en portant une attention particulière sur la mobilité internationale et la coopération.

Background: This article contributes to the literature on gender and academic mobility by contrasting how postcolonial knowledge relations are played out in Swedish, Mozambican and South African academic workplaces. More specifically, it explores the experiences of gendered and racialised inequality in everyday academic working life in the three countries.

Sample and Method: The respondents are Mozambican scholars who have participated in a Swedish development-aid-supported PhD training programme in which mobility is mandatory. Using an online survey and interviews, their experiences of gendered and racialised inequality are theorised through the lenses of postcolonial knowledge theory and feminist translocational intersectionality.

Results: The results point out the importance of highlighting the complex ways in which bodies and spaces are mutually produced and how these change in different postcolonial translocal academic settings and create differing conditions for academic work. In this context, the concept of ‘embodied discursive geographies’ is suggested as a way forward.

Set in a Swedish university context, this article explores the complexities of postgraduate supervision among a group of students who are seldom included in research on the internationalisation of postgraduate supervision – development-aid-funded PhD students. The results highlight the importance of acknowledging students’ prior knowledge and mobility trajectories as crucial for developing emancipatory international supervision. Here the concept of ‘translocal supervision’ is suggested as a theoretical contribution to the field of ‘intercultural supervision’. 

In this chapter, we intend to explore the social processes involved in constructing a research topic as invalid and the role of affect in these processes. Taking research policy in the context of higher education as our field, and research from critical race theory 1 as our example, we study the discursive limits and conditions for research on the location of non-Western researchers in Swedish higher education, and on racial discrimination. We also address the dominant discourses that are activated when research using the concept of race is presented and discussed in public.

Across the globe, academic work is changing in order to meet the demands of the global knowledge economy. This process of change is characterised by the dominant discourses of competition, accountability and excellence, which produce an imaginary of a seemingly disembodied researcher. Departing from a Swedish higher education and research policy landscape, the aim of this article is to explore how, in comparison with their Swedish colleagues, women academics with a migrant background make representations of the good researcher in their work practices. This involves exploring how processes of racialisation - including processes of whiteness are at work when different layers of migration are read through a white Swedish normality. The results indicate that whiteness is an attributed quality and contributes to constructing success, and that racialised researchers stand out as being particularly invisible representations within a Research Excellence framework. In this article I suggest that this visibility/invisibility paradox (Mirza 2009) can be interpreted not only as a reflection of the number of racialised researchers in Swedish higher education, but also as a general discourse of colour-blindness and Swedish white privilege.

This article explores recent changes in research priorities and the allocation of national state research funding. This article also analyzes how changes in research priorities relate to already existing structures of inequality based on gender and race in Swedish academia. More specifically, I have explored - using secondary data, reports, and previous research - the question of where in the academic hierarchy, in what Higher Education Institutions and scientific disciplines, women and men are to be found. In relation to race I have explored which reports and official statistics are available as well as which categorizations of race are used in relation to Higher Education and research policy and its consequences for the sort of knowledge that can thereby be produced. Departing from the intersection of two bodies of theories that are not often related - New Public Management on the one hand and Black Feminism and critical studies on whiteness on the other - this article suggests that the current restructuring of the Swedish research landscape privileges old Higher Education Institutions, academic positions and research fields where women are less represented. The article also suggests that New Public Management principles are integral to these processes of differentiation. Against this backdrop the silence with regard to race, as compared to gender, in Swedish research policy is analyzed as a performative act of whiteness which is produced through norms of Swedish whiteness. I also suggest that these processes could be seen as the legacy of Sweden’s earlier policies regarding registration of ethnic minorities during the race-eugenic area and also of Sweden’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.

Staying ahead in research is becoming more and more important for countries’ social and economic development (Kogan 2005). This is accompanied by discourses on hyper competitiveness at the global, national and local level, increased differentiation between and within universities and the preference of STEM subjects in relation to social sciences and humanities, in Sweden translated to Strategiska satsningarna. In addition, performance indicators such as bibliometrics and concentration of external research funding grants are having an increasing impact on the social organisation of research. The principles that are guiding these changes have generally been theorised under the umbrella of New Public Management. The overall direction of these discourses and practices are usually highlighted as general traits of The global knowledge economy (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff 2000; Sandström and Benner 2000; Väälima and Hoffman 2008). Despite the efforts to formulate a common platform for a European policy on higher education and research, the organisation of research is often heavily mediated by country-based policies and politics. Against this backdrop, I will briefly outline a few areas that are subject to debate when New Public Management principles in Higher Education and Research are theorised. I will also give a few snapshots of the level of implementation in a selection of countries in order to highlight the Swedish context.

I take my point of departure from one specific national context butI intend to apply an international outlook since a) research has always been international to a degree, b) what is going on at the national level is often influenced by agreements across national borders, and c) such acomparative perspective will make critical features of Swedish national research infrastructures more visible.