Prof. Dr. Iris Clemens and Prof. Dr. Dhruv Raina
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this episode, Iris Clemens - Chair of Educational Science at the University of Bayreuth and Principal Investigator of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence - talks with Prof. Dr. Dhruv Raina from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where he teaches the history and philosophy of science. Together they are having a conversation about Prof. Raina's current research that he worked on during his fellowship at the Cluster - the evolution of the university system and the tranfer of knowledge on the African continent.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Prof. Dr. Iris Clemens and Prof. Dr. Dhruv Raina
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
-
Cluster Conversations
- Date
- February 28, 2023
Rights & access
- Extent
- 14 minutes, 3 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 3
Full text
- Transcript
-
[upbeat instrumental music fades in]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
[Music swells slightly then fades out]
Speaker 1: Good morning. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We are here to have a little conversation about our research. Me, that's Iris Clemens. I am from Educational Science and...
Speaker 2: Hello. Good morning to everyone. My name is Dhruv Raina. I teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. And I am a historian and philosopher of science by training. But I also work on higher education and that is what brings Iris and me to work together in this area. So yeah. So Iris, what is it that brought you to New Delhi and to begin to think about a collaboration in the field of higher education?
Speaker 1: Oh well, I am working since many, many years in and about India. And it was mainly about getting interested in different kinds of education and the cultural aspect of education mainly. This is the main thing I am interested in. And so I started to get interest in India many years ago. And this is why we actually meet at Nehru University many years back.
Speaker 2: Alright. So yeah, many years have passed and our intellectual concerns also have evolved. And now I think we would like to work on the transformations taking place in the field of higher education as well as in terms of how disciplines come together, are constituted, how interdisciplinary fields come together. These have been some of our concerns. So would you like to tell us something about, I mean, how we could approach this or could we discuss a little bit about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, what we discussing now since also since some time is how actually concepts or knowledge or however you want to describe it, how it moves, how come it is mobile. Like there are concepts such as travelling, circulating and especially also this concept I learned from you, this trading zones of knowledge. And this is, I think, some common aspect we share. Maybe you can say something about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, I mean, you know, as a historian and philosopher of science, one was always concerned with how a concept which emerges in one institutional environment, say within a university in Cambridge or somewhere, travels to other parts of the world. And how this concept is received, what historians of science call the context of reception. We were always concerned about that. But I think since the nineteen nineties, historians and philosophers of science became concerned with the route concepts take. You know, formerly, yeah, there is a concept which emerges in one place, it travels to another place and you look at its reception. But you were not concerned about the route of circulation. What happens on the way? What are the routes? Who are the people? Who are the intermediaries who carry these? And I think in the nineteen nineties, people began to look at the circulation of knowledge in a different light. What were the routes this knowledge took? Who were the intermediaries? What were the technologies, et cetera? So this became a matter of concern. And then you try to understand the conceptual dynamics of this process in traveling. And I think in two thousands, when the Heidelberg cluster of excellence was set up to look at Euro Asia and the asymmetries involved, I think there was an important paper by Arjun Appadurai on knowledge flows. And suddenly some of us said, we were not going the knowledge flows ways, but we decided to look at knowledge on the move. All right. And at some point in my conversations with you, I think we decided to say, knowledge on the move, but what about institutions on the move? Do institutions also follow similar dynamics? Do they travel in the same way? So I think that has been perhaps our concern, right? That, yeah, because, I mean, in a way, institutions and knowledge seem to go together. But so institutions too travel, disciplines travel.
Speaker 1: There are movements. So yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right. I mean like you, uh, you as of course as a historian, you always look more back and uh, um, so I'm more interested or the main concern of me is contemporary issues more. This is uh, uh, you've done so much work about how um concepts uh traveled and what happened on the move. Um, like uh, you know, one of your last books uh about this uh also the conversation between Einstein and Indian scholars and so on. Um, for me it was always um, I saw also coming from the educational science uh, a concern to see what is uh happening today and um, um, what kind of concepts of education are on the move. Like uh, what kind of concept uh going global so to say. And of course we have uh this big issue of these large-scale assessments and this is uh like PISA or TIMMS or whatever. And um, so this is also something that um, it is always taken as if you could simply take it and put it into another context and it would be the same. Uh, and I think we we agree and disagree with that. Uh, and uh, that um, that also um touches the the very idea of universal education after all, you know. Um, and this is something uh we also discussed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure. No, I think um, the other important thing too, I mean uh go back to historical issue. I mean um, the question of the emergence of disciplines. But um, I also work with people who work on big data on things like interdisciplinarity. And I think interdisciplinarity is today a major movement. Everybody is trying to be interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. But the meanings associated with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity themselves also can vary because uh, the way the way the constellations of knowledge are chopped up within a university will vary across institutions, across countries and across regions. So I think like your PISA assessment, there are other things we could also look at. I mean, for example, the movement of disciplinarity or interdisciplinarity or for example, there's this raging worldwide movement on decolonising the university. And it's not just a question of decolonising the university in the former colonies, but there's also decolonisation which is taking place within European universities. There is such a movement. So what does decolonisation mean in these different contexts? I think that's another important subject for investigation within the within the domain of higher education. And being here in Bayreuth perhaps you could tell us something about some of these discussions if they are taking place in the cluster on higher education.
Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, maybe first I step back to your question also about institutions. Like, of course, this is a very, very important point because um, like education for example, uh is uh, of course, one cannot understand any kind of educational concepts, practices, whatever, without seeing the institution in which it is done or it's practiced, you know. Whether it's school, uh, and this is again a big question is um, uh, school, uh, what is exactly the institution of school? But and the same is true for university, of course, as you said, like, um, is university, um, is it really a concept that is global actually? Is it really so that um, university in Bayreuth uh is comparable with uh university um, for example in India, like in New Delhi? This is uh, it's a, for me it's still an open question because we we do have a certain concept uh or ideas or semantics, but uh, do we have uh comparable institutions? This is uh, open question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, sure. No, I mean um, um, yeah, I mean, I think there's been a lot of writing in the field of higher education basically on the idea of the university itself, right? A huge amount of of writing as to uh, on the uh, on the idea of of the university. And uh, over here, one gets the feeling that given, given the internationalization of higher education, we see a constant tension between very...
Speaker 1: local demands placed on the university, as well as the question of compliance because of the internationalization of education. So I think it is on this count that one can begin to talk about drawing comparisons between the two, that universities may have started out based on very local compulsions, needs, right? We see the emergence of university towns all over the world when you look at the history of the university, that in a small town in the middle of nowhere suddenly you decide we shall put up an Indian Institute of Technology here or maybe we'll put up Bhiwadi which is not in the middle of nowhere but we'll put up a university here. So there are kinds of compulsions and policy decisions which have to do with the city, the region, development, the requirements which influence the founding of the university. But once the university is out there, then I think the university today is producing professionals, not just for the national economy but for an international order. So universities are, I think constantly navigating this tension between the local and the international. And that's the interesting point of comparison, right?
Speaker 2: And I think it's also important to see this, the difference between the idea of university and actually what is done or the practice or the institution how it is, because I mean we have this ideal idea of university like developed some times ago and with this yeah very nice semantics about everything like how university should be, but on the other side we see that universities are changing so much and economic factors are so important today, only to give an example for university. And I think it's also one has to be very careful with this continuity that is thought, like if there would be one kind of university and this is established and it's the same today, but actually it's of course it's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah sure, sure, no, but I think this raises precisely, you know, I mean the issue I try to refer to, that this tension between globalization and localization within the university context. But as you rightly pointed out, I mean you can't have too normative an idea about what the university is, because the university itself is driven by a variety or steered by a number of other factors. For example, some of these factors can be internal to the processes of the production of knowledge and some of these factors are quite external to it. And we see both. Look at the debate on the new modes of knowledge production, et cetera. And yes, I mean these are issues to look at and these issues we need to look at also probably in different kinds of, I mean it would be interesting to look, do a study which compares a university in India with a university in Africa and a university in Europe, as to how are they negotiating the new tensions that the university is subject to today. I think that's interesting and I mean it's been interesting talking to you and thank you very much and thank you to the listeners.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you. So bye-bye.
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