Criticism of racial inequalities in academia and the call to decolonise knowledge production in the social sciences has a long history. Postcolonial and black feminist scholars have long shown how research and teaching practices often reproduce racial and gender inequalities in academia by including certain knowledge and knowledge holders as more worthy and excluding others. The initial idea of this project was conceived in the context when the solidarity with the black lives Matter movement in the United States created a wave of protests across most of the Global North and into Europe. What particularly caught my attention in those days was the support of a group of academics in humanities and social sciences in France for state-imposed control of national funding, who condemned postcolonial and decolonial studies for what they claimed to be, among others, ‘not scientific’ and ‘not European’. A few years prior to 2020 social movements, the call for decolonizing in universities travelled from South Africa and gained traction across the global north and into Europe, endorsed by a fraction of academics while deemed irrelevant by others.
The main question of the URDER project was to analyse how academic elites, who are the gatekeepers of academia, valuate scientific merit and how they understand the relevance of gender, racial and ethnic inequalities in their assessments of the merit of researchers and research proposals. The project aimed to explore these through two main steps. Firstly, by developing an interdisciplinary expertise based on Science Policy Studies, Sociology of Valuation, Sociology of Knowledge, as well as Postcolonial and Decolonial Sociology. Secondly, by mapping and analysing the European Research Council’s (ERC) evaluation panels in the Social Science and Humanities (SH).
Peer review has gained extreme importance in shaping academia. As the cornerstone of merit, peer review provides justification for gatekeeping of academia and determining the quality of knowledge and the knowledge holder through publications, distribution of research grants and hiring. The research was interested in studying how the boundaries of merit or “excellence” are drawn via the evaluation of the ERC reviewer experts. The methodology of the project was based on qualitative social science, specifically document analysis and interviews, while quantitative methods were employed in the sampling of qualitative interviews.
The empirical research was aimed at two areas – the assessment of excellence in the ERC grant project review and the interaction between diversity and excellence in the assessment. The first looked at how a fair evaluation is understood by the ERC panellists. The second looked into the ERC guidelines and strategies for realising the “robust” evaluation and the tactics that panellists use to reach a fair judgment. In the course of the project, the analysis of the ERC led to a more historical understanding of the concept of “excellence” in academic knowledge production and the way it is used to operate between science and policy in the European context. The impact of the project thus is located in this area.
