Two Modes of Regionalisation in Scholarly Communication The Perspective of Polish and Danish Researchers

The paper compares two different modes in which scholars negotiate the regionalisation of scholarly communication. It is grounded in higher education studies, particularly in its analysis of regions: socially constructed spaces spanning countries or even continents (Lorenzo, 2022; Robertson, 2018). That tradition has mostly responded to the rise of top-down projects such as the Bologna Process in Europe (e.g. Chou & Ravinet, 2015). While some researchers have been interested in bottom-up efforts at regionalisation, few studies have focused on the perspectives of individual researchers engaged in them. This gap is addressed in the current paper, which uses semi-structured in-depth interviews to compare the regionalising work of Polish historians and Danish game scholars. The interviews come from two research projects. One was a five-year grant project in which the first author of this paper participated. Among other things, it involved 123 interviews (carried out in 2018–2020) on the responses of Polish scholars to the reforms of the national academic system. For the present study, we have selected 30 interviews with historians; they discussed regional scholarly communication more than the other groups interviewed, though it was a topic emerging spontaneously in conversation, not planned beforehand. The first project inspired the second, based on interviews with Danish researchers working in the field of game studies, employed at various universities and departments in Denmark; 5 interviews have been conducted so far, and further 3-5 are planned. In this project, regional communication has been the sole intended focus. Political researchers typically use juxtapositional comparison, in which they “place like kinds of things side by side to catalogue their similarities and differences” (Schaffer, 2021, p. 49). This would be difficult to do here, given the differences between our two cases in terms of country, academic system, discipline, and national and institutional policies and cultures. Instead, we have decided on perspectival comparative analysis – a comparison of different kinds of things from an external vantage point aimed to change the perspective from which we observe the cases. Through this analysis, we hope to foreground the regionalisation process rather than the cases themselves. The first ideal-typical mode of region construction in scholarly communication is largely represented in our material by Polish historians. It involves a sense of a mismatch between disciplinary commitments (which put an emphasis on proximate spaces, communities, and languages) and the new evaluation system (which fosters a model of research internationalisation that is ostensibly universalist, but in fact privileges the English language and the Core Anglosphere). The other mode of region construction can mostly be seen in the interviews with Danish game scholars, who tend to treat the Nordic dimension of their work as almost natural, in line with the strong regional aspect of the early institutionalisation of game studies around 2000. Both modes have a common EU context, but they are also grounded in specific institutional and national research policies.