Horizon 2020’s Europe: Deconstructing European domination in scientific production

Abstract

Decolonial and South epistemologies criticize the inequality and coloniality of knowledge production throughout the world. From this perspective, this contribution aims to participate to a Critical Political Geography of European science by focusing on the Horizon 2020 fundings and deconstructing the mechanisms of European power projection in the scientific field. Studying the researched spaces and how the fundings and the projects work highlights the tension between the universality principle of science and the eurocentrism of the European research. This presentation relies on research on the over-researching of spaces (Aiken 2022), the spaces representations (Didelon-Loiseau 2022), and scientometrics (Castro Torres et Alburez-Gutierrez 2022).

The data used are provided in open access by the European Commission in the Cordis database, which gives information about the research projects funded by Horizon 2020. These data are studied through named entity recognition and quantitative analyses. They are completed by analyses of grey literature and interviews with participants to ERC fundings.

The imperialist goal of the program is clearly showed: to guarantee the dominant position of “Europe” (i.e., UE) in the world in innovation and research. Here, ‘‘Europe’’ is unequally represented: there are huge inequalities between Eastern and Western Europe. As for Eastern Europe, the rest of the world is mostly excluded from the coordination of research projects funded by the EU and only viewed in a utilitarian perspective: to bring state-of-the-art knowledge to West European researchers.

These structural inequalities might be bypassed by the agency of researchers and their teams, but the uneven distribution of fundings also seems to lead to an uneven distribution of researched spaces: Europe is over-researched compared to other continents, and studied with a specific perspective. Africa, for instance, is more approached by applied sciences (health sciences, agriculture sciences…), through the angle of developmentalism, than Europe. As a consequence, Europe, as a continent, is constructed by specific discourses that will be presented.

Bibliography

Aiken, Gerald Taylor. 2022. « Towards a theory of over-researched places ». In Over Researched Places. Routledge.

Castro Torres, Andrés F., et Diego Alburez-Gutierrez. 2022. « North and South: Naming practices and the hidden dimension of global disparities in knowledge production ». Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (10): e2119373119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2119373119.

Didelon-Loiseau, Clarisse. 2022. « Relation de l’incident de « l’Ever Given » dans la presse quotidienne française ; une vision du monde ». Confins. Revue franco-brésilienne de géographie, no 56 (septembre). doi:10.4000/confins.47168.