Archive for calls, 2012

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[ecrea] Papers from ALAIC-ECREA joint Task Force panel @ IAMCR conference now online - on Academic Production Assessment:

Thu Sep 06 12:53:36 GMT 2012



The ALAIC-ECREA joint Task Force organised a panel at the IAMCR conference, on the topic of "Academic Production Assessment: Latin-American & European cross-fertilizations in Communication and Media Studies".

Two of the papers of this session are now available online.

The Special Conference Session was convened by Fernando Oliveira Paulino & Nico Carpentier, and took place on Monday 16 July 2012 (16:00-17:30). The participants were Bart Cammaerts (LSE, UK), Gabriel Kaplún (UDR, Uruguay), Aimée Vega Montiel (UNAM, Mexico) and Katrin Voltmer (University of Leeds, UK). Also a statement from César Bolaño (Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil) was included.

The following papers are available for download:

1/Katrin Voltmer: "Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and subjective factors in evaluating academic production" Download here as [pdf]: http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

2/Aimée Vega Montiel: "For the democracy of the systems of evaluating academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars". Download here as [pdf]: http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

See also here for the ECREA news item:
http://www.ecrea.eu/news/article/id/184

Special Session Abstract

The theoretical, methodological and empirical development of the field of Communication and Media Studies is characterized by a diversity which also has a spatial dimension. Although opportunities for global exchange exist, academic communities are situated in the local, the urban and the regional and function as imaginary communities, because of institutional, financial and linguistic reasons. This regional diversity is a significant asset to our field, but at the same time we should avoid counter-productive processes of intellectual isolationism or hierarchisation through the organization of creative dialogues and exchanges.

The contributions in the ALAIC-ECREA panel aim to contribute to an interregional dialogue, between Latin-America and Europe by emphasizing the regional specificity and contextual embeddedness of theories, methodologies and research traditions in Latin-America and Europe, critically comparing the strengths and weaknesses, the abundances and gaps, and then articulating these differences as opportunities for the intellectual enrichment of both academic communities.

This panel topic fosters discussion and interregional dialogues on the assessment systems in the communication and media studies field, such as the evaluation of the peer-review system in academic production, academic publishing and publication models and the validation and endorsement of intellectual work. The models and systems designed for measuring and assessing peer-review system in academic production obviously reflect a country's political conditions and technical and operational capacities, both current and potential. As evidenced by the Latin American experience of academic assessment thus far, international organisations can play a role in planning, critiquing or adjusting systems of measuring and assessing academic production.

The purposes of academic production assessments and its uses will be the topic of an extensive debate in the ALAIC-ECREA panel in Durban. The advantages of specific approaches, methodologies, and instruments, as well as the expected impact of assessments, will be discussed in order to see how effectively a consensus can be reached for a joint academic assessment statement between communication and media studies researchers in Latin America and Europe.

It will be especially helpful to discuss and clearly define - in line with each association's mission and vision - the preferred methodologies and coverage of the academic assessment. Evenly crucial is the very necessary alignment of these methodologies with the purpose and use of academic assessment system. If the data provided by the assessments are to be used to improve research, the instruments must reflect this.

Abstracts of the Presentations

The impact of academic assessment on publishing strategies
Bart Cammaerts

While assessment of academics in itself is a good thing, there is also collateral damage induced by the way this assessment is conducted and the way in which academic work is evaluated. The heavy emphasis on star-quality peer-reviewed publications puts enormous pressure on top journals and on individual academics to get 'into' these journals. While it is often stated that a piece of work will be judged on its merits rather than on where it has been published, senior academics at departmental, school and university level do not want to take the risk and rightfully or wrongfully insist on monitoring, managing and sometimes shaping the publication strategies of their staff. This is often a highly subtle process whereby academic staff also internalise the requirements to comply and feel compelled to take strategic decisions on where to publish what they write, maximising impact in bibliometric terms. In the long run this could have a detrimental effect on smaller specialised journals, edited collections as well as online journals, all deemed un-REF-able in UK-terms. This de facto devaluation of publications in such outlets during appointments, promotions and research assessments also perpetuates and strengthens the stranglehold a few large publishing companies have over academic publishing and over access to academic knowledge. Criteria such as global impact, which in itself is not wrong to aim for, does end up favouring publishers with global reach, as well as the long standing top journals, which in every field have all been bought up by publishing conglomerates and firmly behind the pay wall. It also pushes academics to constantly aim higher and carefully consider their publishing strategy in line with the particular demands of the research assessment, whatever these are perceived to be within every institution fueled by the ambitions it has.

Discipline and indiscipline in Latin American communication studies
Gabriel Kaplún

The different traditions that built the field of communication studies in Latin America not only proposed problems and suggested ways to address them, but also brought different ways of relating to the academic world and the traditions of other regions. A first generation of studies focused on the structures of media power-economic and discursive structures gave way to another generation with a greater emphasis on recipients, their cultures and subjectivities. On the other hand, the field became the site of professional studies geared toward for the exercise of professions, in a predominantly functionalist perspective. And finally research dealing with social practices, initially away from academia, focused on the search for alternative and counter-hegemonic communication practices. These four traditions more or less intensely talked among themselves, producing multiple crossings, conflicts and hybridizations. Some of them were from the outset an explicit link with European and American intellectual traditions. In others, this was less explicit but no less important. Some were born and maintained a greater disciplinary vocation within the scope of the academic world and under a scientific heading. Others are geared more to research social and political actors with transformative vocation, whose ways of doing research are considered acts of "indiscipline" in academia, by their dialogue with forms of knowledge not classified within the scientific field. To evaluate the academic production that comes from different intellectual proposals becomes a complex but necessary challenge, especially for a dialogue between European and Latin American intellectual traditions. Academic assessment is a complex topic namely when discussed in the context of accreditation or regulatory processes that have financial and legal implications, like it's the case of many in Europe. Besides the difficulty of agreeing on the instrument, scale and measures to be applied when we talk of such a broad field as media and communication studies, another important difficulty arouses if we bring into the debate the vocational and professional oriented training provided by many of the schools in this area, a fact that calls upon competences on the teachers side rarely considered by more traditional academic assessment procedures. In this talk we will try to present some of the main trends present in current European assessment procedures, namely in southern Europe, and see how they conflict or complement other more informal and sometimes efficient assessment approaches.

For the democracy of the systems of measuring academic production: convergences of Latin-American & European scholars
Aimée Vega Montiel
Download here as [pdf]: http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_aimeevegamontiel.pdf

The contribution of Latin-American scholars to Media and Communication Studies has been very significant in at least two theoretical/methodological fields: communication policies and cultural studies - with special emphasis on the convergence between communication and culture. However, the dialogue and exchange with scholars from the North are not usually in terms of equality but of hierarchy. Why? Southern scholars communities do not actively participate in the definition of the models and systems designed for measuring and assessing academic production. Southern scholars are subjected to the rules defined in other latitudes of the world - in latitudes where different social problems and different scientific conditions for research exist. The effects of this are evident in at least two scenarios: the construction of the object of study, i.e., theoretical and methodological definitions for research. The second is the influence on the research agenda: there are many problems in the southern regions that, not qualifying as a priority for organizations such as UNESCO, become invisible. In this logic - the logic of the market-, that tends to legitimate a few theories, methods and problems, competitiveness over cooperation tend to be the rule of our production and organization. For this reason, I firmly think IAMCR is the place where the convergence between Latin-American and European scholars can take the form of specific and practical actions to promote a more democratic field for researchers. Some of these proposals will be discussed in my presentation.

Is quality in the eye of the beholder? Objective and subjective factors in evaluating academic production
Katrin Voltmer
Download here as [pdf]: http://www.ecrea.eu/index.php/archive/download/filename/paper_voltmer.pdf

Recent years have seen increased efforts to measure and objectively evaluate the work of both individual academics and academic institutions. League tables of universities, impact factor scores of journals, publication profiles of scholars have become a key factor for the success or failure in an increasingly competitive market. For most of us evaluating the academic quality of academic outputs is part of our professional life as reviewers for journals, conferences, funding organisations etc. In this contribution I want to challenge the assumption that academic quality can be measured objectively. I argue that quality is a social construction that emerges from the discourses of scholars of the academic community. However, the academic community of a field, e.g. Communication and Media Studies, is itself fragmented and hence applies different criteria for evaluating the quality of academic production. Not only do different research paradigms - positivist, hermeneutic etc. - imply different quality criteria; national cultures have also developed specific ways of evaluating intellectual outputs. I conclude by suggesting a deliberative approach to academic evaluation that encourages dialogue between the evaluators. By addressing the reasons for consensus or disagreement deliberative assessment practices could help to overcome some of the weaknesses and failures of the existing 'objective' methods of academic evaluation.
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