Transnational academic collaboration: a critical analysis of the global and national contexts and constraints of co-authorship

Abstract

This paper considers both the macro and micro contexts of transnational academic research collaboration and co-authorship in HSS. It is argued that academic collaboration in the form of “co-authorship” in the fields of HSS may be intrinsically an oxymoron in nature. It suggests the structural dissonance in the process of knowledge creation in HSS – a radical differentiation between narrative knowledge in HSS produced for our understanding and its storage and capitalization for scientification and datafication. The paper discusses structural and agentic attributes to transnational academic collaboration and the embedded power relationships within and its ethical implications.