Desire, Conditions and Policies of Social Sciences Researchers’ Recognition: Reflections on Fieldwork and Writing Performances
In this paper, I propose to analyze the researcher-subjects’ behavior, during the research performance, through the prism of recognition, as a conceptual idea/notion. I question my own approach and my own subject-researcher behavior in the framework of my own doctoral research in Bolivia. In particular, I analyze two key dimensions of social science research: the fieldwork performance and the (eurocentrist) academic space in which I am enrolled. Analyzing the fieldwork experience, understood as a social performance through the prism of recognition allows us first to clarify the tensions between the strategic conformism of the researcher and the reproduction of local social norms. Secondly, we highlight the researcher’s desire to obtain academic recognition and the way in which this desire enjoins her to reproduce the dominant grammar of academic recognition. In particular, this desire to obtain recognition, whether social or academic, is closely linked to the power relations that structure the academic space (which, moreover, is not considered as a neutral space). Finally, we show that if the promise of recognition renders the contestation of recognition standards difficult, it does not prevent their circumvention, for example by adhering to alternative narratives of the quality of research (“slow science”). The latter can indeed act as alternative channels of recognition, producing new narratives and new grammars of recognition. However, these mechanisms of conformity, resistance, or circumvention of recognition standards, both in terms of field performance and academic space, often take place in the realm of the unconscious and the non-cognitive.