The SCRG is an interdisciplinary team of scholars based in Poznań, Poland, whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries in research on scholarly communication.

Our research concentrates on four broad and interrelated areas – each coordinated and developed by specific members of the Group.

1. Critique of the Political Economy of Science and Higher Education.

Our first area of inquiry combines methodological self-reflection with the development of critique as a research method. The form of critique we pursue is integral in nature: it unites its negative and positive moments. It includes ontological-political reflection, the denaturalisation of taken-for-granted assumptions, and the analysis of the political economy shaping the capitalist structuring of science and higher education. It also encompasses the co-research of protest and resistance emerging under these conditions, as well as the identification – within contemporary systemic crises – of elements that prefigure alternative institutional and epistemic orders.

2. Conflicts around Metrics, Evaluative States, and Scholarly Communication.

Our second area addresses the dynamics of scholarly communication through the lens of conflict and primary resistance. The creativity of science consistently exceeds the metrics imposed upon it; science is always more than what can be captured within a homogeneous evaluative measure. We therefore examine the social struggles surrounding the construction and negotiation of metrics, as well as seemingly anomalous practices that reveal their conventional and contingent character. Evaluative homogeneity is the outcome of processes often marked by symbolic and institutional coercion, stabilised in many systems by the evaluative state. Yet such processes are never complete, and their results are never fixed. Measures of effectiveness in science are both the product of conflict and the source of new conflicts that reopen and destabilise their apparent closure.

3. Academic (Semi-)Peripheries and Knowledge Production.

Our third research area analyses the complex role of science in semi-peripheral countries, understood not merely as intermediary zones between the centre and the periphery of the global scientific system, but also as sites of alternative models of knowledge development. We begin from the premise that under conditions of globalisation and networked scientific organisation, the traditional transmission function of semi-peripheries is eroding. This shift invites renewed reflection on their institutional, epistemic, and political potential. Our research encompasses both historical and contemporary forms of alternative modernisation of science and modernisation through science, with particular attention to their institutional, organisational, and economic conditions. We examine modes of measuring and governing science in semi-peripheral contexts, as well as lived research practices shaped by local epistemic projects. The aim is to identify the creative potential of underrecognised organisational models and to assess their significance for more pluralistic trajectories of knowledge-system development.

4. Science and Higher Education and/in (Post-)Communism(s).

Our fourth area situates our research within the open and heterogeneous space of post-communist and post-socialist countries. Moving beyond strategic essentialism associated with the “Global East,” we seek to identify, within the historical experience of communism and communist modernisation projects, the common element that has diverted the trajectories of science and higher education systems away from the dominant Western template. We investigate both the past – efforts to construct collectivist systems, alternative logics of value in planning and evaluation – and the present: processes of erasure and displacement of historical trajectories, as well as the remnants of common forms of life and the ruins of infrastructures that once enabled more collective modes of knowledge production and institutional organisation.

The group is led by professor Krystian Szadkowski at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań – one of the largest and best Polish universities.

Our X (Twitter) profile: @ScholarlyCommRG