Academic promotion politics in Uganda

Publication, as one of the characteristic requirements for academic promotion, raises several questions about the subtexts of its performance and their implications for publication in Africa. 

Through an empirical qualitative study of two Ugandan universities, Jimmy will highlight how promotion policies and practices shape publication outlet choices and Africa-based publication initiatives. He will show that promotion processes in Ugandan universities are driven by complex quality checks that are sometimes characterised by biases against publications from African outlets and rationalised malice against individual academics in settling personal scores. 

With the partial aid of theories of (post)coloniality and Southern theory, Jimmy will explain the roots of Afro-pessimistic biases in promotion practices and argue that both the genuine quality checks and other neo-colonial biases incentivise publishing in the ‘North’ and leads scholars to avoid African options. This exacerbates the already challenging circumstances of African publishers, limits local access to knowledge, and shrinks space for epistemic pluralism.

Speaker

• Jimmy Spire Ssentongo - Makerere University 

Chair

• David Mills - University of Oxford

This event will be particularly useful for those interested in higher education research.

Related links

• Centre for Global Higher Education
• Department of Education, Practice and Society