Differentiering och excellens i det nya forskningslandskapet

Abstract

This article explores recent changes in research priorities and the allocation of national state research funding. This article also analyzes how changes in research priorities relate to already existing structures of inequality based on gender and race in Swedish academia. More specifically, I have explored - using secondary data, reports, and previous research - the question of where in the academic hierarchy, in what Higher Education Institutions and scientific disciplines, women and men are to be found. In relation to race I have explored which reports and official statistics are available as well as which categorizations of race are used in relation to Higher Education and research policy and its consequences for the sort of knowledge that can thereby be produced. Departing from the intersection of two bodies of theories that are not often related - New Public Management on the one hand and Black Feminism and critical studies on whiteness on the other - this article suggests that the current restructuring of the Swedish research landscape privileges old Higher Education Institutions, academic positions and research fields where women are less represented. The article also suggests that New Public Management principles are integral to these processes of differentiation. Against this backdrop the silence with regard to race, as compared to gender, in Swedish research policy is analyzed as a performative act of whiteness which is produced through norms of Swedish whiteness. I also suggest that these processes could be seen as the legacy of Sweden’s earlier policies regarding registration of ethnic minorities during the race-eugenic area and also of Sweden’s collaboration with Nazi Germany during the 1930s.