Global and Peripheral Identities in the Production of Knowledge on Higher Education Reforms: The Latin American Case

Abstract

In a globalized world of knowledge production, issues arise as to the presence of, and relationships between, different regions of the world. A particular issue is that of the presence of peripheral regions such as Latin America. The focus here is research into higher education reforms and, by using bibliometrics, a word frequency analysis and a thematic analysis, patterns of publication and themes in two different academic datasets — the global Web of Science and the more regional SciELO — are examined. Although the configuration of knowledge production on higher education reforms is seen as relatively homogeneous in certain respects, separate circuits of knowledge production are also revealed and even within a region (here, Latin America). Higher education reform is posed differently according to the publication circuits of journals and their position in global knowledge markets. A geopolitical imbalance in knowledge production is revealed and it is suggested that different regions of the world possess distinctive epistemic identities. The paper concludes by suggesting that there is room for negotiation between the different zones of epistemic influence.