Mats Utas (PI), Maria Eriksson Baaz, Swati Parashar, James Vincent, Anju Toppo, Oscar Dunia

Funded by the Swedish Research Council

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 broader 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 broader 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 correspondence experiment, in-depth interviews and text analysis.

This project follows up on Exploring the Research Backstage and builds on the many lessons from that one. In the previous project, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we ended up working quite a lot on our own. This time around, we have been able to meet and better coordinate in this one. India-based researcher Anju Toppo has visited Sweden, and the team, including my Sierra Leone-based research colleague James Vincent, has travelled to Ranchi in India. It would be naïve to say that we now work on equal terms, but we are taking some small steps on that journey.