ON CITATIONS, RATING GAMES AND OTHER PESKY ANIMALS: WHICH ZOO FOR SOUTH AFRICAN HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The assessment of research activity linked to the allocation of resources according to the results of those evaluations is now undertaken in a number of countries. Numerous debates in Human Geography have emerged to reflect upon how research assessment systems affect professional human geographers and whether or not anything truly positive has been achieved through these assessment systems. Within South African Human Geography similar debates have not to date been documented. Against this backdrop, the key objective of this investigation is to address the paucity of critical reflection upon South Africa's National Research Foundation's (NRF) rating system and to assess the position of human geographers in this research “surveillance system”. It is argued that the NRF rating system perpetuates the imposition of the norms of distantly located rating schemes-principally the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) -upon the South African academic imagination. In the process South African human geography is entrapped; either sewing the theoretical needs of the discipline's Anglo-American heartland, or serving local needs and becoming an irrelevance to “international” human geography. Human geographies that can “make a difference” to both audiences is, it is argued, unlikely.