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The Kafkaesque world of Polish academia

Updated: Oct 31


A new publication

Recently, I and a colleague had an article published in Human Organization, the flagship journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA).


In this paper, we look at education as a bordering practice and ask how borders affect both access to formal education and integration/belonging within schools and in the wider Polish society. Bordering is an active process of social and cultural exclusion. The concept has been used in studies of migrant education mainly in relation to immigration status that excludes foreign-born children from schooling. In this article, we ask how borders affect both access to formal education and belonging within schools in Poland. Our discussion centers both on places and actors involved in re/bordering public education in the cities of Poznań and Wrocław in western Poland, where – apart from physical, political, and legal borders – migrants and refugees are likely to experience other boundaries, which we elucidate using thematic analysis of interviews we conducted with Ukrainian pupils, their parents, and teachers. The article is Open access and you can read it here.


Short-lived happiness


I was very happy when the anonymous reviewers and the journal editor accepted our article. I published in Human Organization before and was always pleases with the reception my papers received. However, in the Kafkaesque world of Polish academia, papers published in Human Organization receive so few points that they are not worthy of inclusion in application for university achievement awards.


The parametric game (aka punktoza)




The parametric game begun with the Law 2.0 passed in 2018. And as one observer noted, the rollercoaster started: "One could go to bed as a mediocre scientist and wake up as a top notch scholar" since the list of "best" journals was constantly in flux.


Over the years, I have noticed that some migration or anthropology journals were simply missing from the list. I wonder who is responsible for including or excluding journals from the list. A couple of times, I even wrote to the Minsitry of Higher Education but got no response or the responding representative wondered why I care since I am based in the United States. I chucked the response to total lack of awarness of globalization and associated international collaborations.... sigh


Tenure and promotion


Don't get me wrong, every country has some sort of an evaluation process to ensure academics produce high quality work. In the United States, where I have been working since the mid-1980s, we have tenure and promotion process. Each university has somewhat different guidelines on what is involved in evaluatiing a young faculty member who is seeking tenure or promoting a more senior academic. Most tenure and promotion committees use, among other things, a number of publications, especially peer-reviewed articles and single-authored books. They look at the impact factor of journals where the person up for tenure or promotion published. Impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Impact Factors have been widely criticized but at least they are not caculated by some arbitrary group of people that may or may not be subject matter experts in ceratin disciplines, but reflect (to some extend) scholars' interests in particular publications.


I am also buffled by lack of apperciation of university presses. Books publishe dby Routledge or Springer get many more points than books published by university presses.


For me, the issue is also the pressure to produce and ... publish or perish!


Slow science


Thinkers like the Belgian philosopher, Isabelle Stengers emphasizes that research is deeply intertwined with broader social interests, which means that science cannot or should not race ahead in isolation but must learn instead to slow down.


Slow science has something in common with the other “slow” movements, like slow food, but it does not hearken back to an imagined golden age. There is still plenty of slow, careful science among the contemporary sciences, but Stengers claims it is under threat because of the pressure to produce.

Like fast food, fast science is quickly prepared, not particularly good, and it clogs up the system. Efforts to tackle our most pressing issues have been stymied by conflict within the scientific community and mixed messages symptomatic of a rushed approach. What is more, scientific research is being shaped by the bubbles and crashes associated with economic speculation and the market. A focus on conformism, competitiveness, opportunism and flexibility has made it extremely difficult to present cases of failure to the public, for fear that it will lose confidence in science altogether. 

Isabelle Stengers



A slow science movement has taken hold in several countries. In their recent book, The Slow Professor. Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, explain the positive effects of slow science stating: “Slowing down is about asserting the importance of contemplation, connectedness, fruition, and complexity. It gives meaning to letting research take the time: it needs to ripen and makes it easier to resist the pressure to be faster; it gives meaning to thinking about scholarship as a community, not a competition” (2017: 57). Hence, slow science is not about doing the same thing at a slower pace, but about creating conditions that allow vital aspects of research to flourish: space to ask new questions, to uncover and reconsider assumptions, to doubt.


Will Poland join the slow science movement?



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