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Advancing a knowledge ecology: changing patterns of higher education studies in Latin America

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Abstract

Drawing on de Sousa Santos’s work on Epistemologies of the South (2014), this paper critically examines the patterns of publication in higher education studies in mainstream and non-mainstream journals in Latin American between 2000 and 2015. An analysis of 1370 papers—130 indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection indexes and 1240 indexed in the Scientific Electronic Library Online index (SciELO)—indicates that Latin American academics are engaged in lively practices of publication. However, a dual pattern of publication is identified, characterised by researchers extensively publishing in non-mainstream journals and also maintaining a presence in mainstream journals. Issues related to language, rankings and prestige, the North/South divide, the distinction between hard/basic and soft/applied sciences and the nature of higher education studies are used to explain such a pattern. Although there is a tense process of securing a dual epistemic recognition, there is also a positive tension that involves collaboration across a plurality of knowledges. Finally, this paper offers the concept of zones of epistemic influence, which opens spaces for an ecology of knowledges in which knowledges from both the North and the South constitute a new assemblage that accords due weight to a plurality of epistemic interests.

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Notes

  1. Latin American countries included here were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and Venezuela.

  2. The Emerging Source Citation Index was not included since it subsumes journals that under evaluation in order to be part of the core collection.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by Conicyt-Chile, Fondecyt project 1170374 and PIA-CONICYT (Chile) Basal Funds for Centers of Excellence Project BF0003. We greatly appreciate the help provided by research assistants Ricardo Zavala and Benjamín Gareca.

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  1. Centre for Advanced Research in Education, University of Chile, Periodista José Carrasco Tapia 75, Santiago, Chile

    Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela & Carolina Gómez

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  1. Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela
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Correspondence to Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela.

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Guzmán-Valenzuela, C., Gómez, C. Advancing a knowledge ecology: changing patterns of higher education studies in Latin America. High Educ 77, 115–133 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0264-z

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