Academic Centrarchy: a Political System of Governing Education and Technology

TLDR: In this article, the authors rely on two international projects to argue for the existence of a "centrarchy" in the fields of education and technology (and beyond), where power rests with the Centre.

Abstract: This article relies on two international projects to argue for the existence of a ‘centrarchy’ in the fields of education and technology (and beyond). Centrarchy denotes a power structure in which power rests with ‘the Centre’. The Centre signifies well-respected departments, top-tiered journals, the best editors, critical reviewers and leading authors; the Periphery denotes anyone else. The Centre has assigned itself the mission of guiding the Periphery out of its underdevelopment. It has served as a proxy for quality scholarship and believes that Periphery’s societies require a saviour (the Centre). It has ignored the knowledge that has (and could have) been produced by the Periphery’s researchers. Its ways of researching the world have been internalised and taken for granted by the Periphery’s academics, who have come to see these ways as the natural order and common sense. It has seen the Periphery’s societies as outliers appropriate merely for local case studies, whereas its case studies transcend locality and have universal value. The Centre–Periphery ‘wall’ is unbreachable because of empirically uninspected factors, which are unearthed here. This article, furthermore, shows some academics to be on ‘the periphery of the Periphery’.