Higher Education Cutbacks and the Reshaping of Epistemic Hierarchies: An Ethnography of the Case of Feminist Scholarship

Abstract

Analyses of contemporary transformations in higher education and research funding indicate that such transformations impact not just on labour conditions and processes of knowledge production, but also on demarcations of what counts as ‘proper’ knowledge. As universities in many countries see their core funding reduced, profitability gains importance as a criterion of knowledge evaluation, sometimes producing sudden changes in long-standing discourses about the relative value of disciplines. This article examines how funding changes (re)shape epistemic hierarchies, drawing on an ethnography of academia in Portugal and using women’s, gender and feminist studies (WGFS) as a case study. I show that amidst significant cutbacks, the recognition that feminist scholarship has financial value discourages questioning of its epistemic value, a questioning common until recently. Yet, this change is described publicly as motivated only by epistemic factors. Thus, I analyse interviews and speeches to examine how links between pecuniary profitability and epistemic status are downplayed to maintain a discursive framing of universities as institutions concerned with knowledge, rather than profit.