Perverted Research and the Political Imagination - The Trial of the Good Scholar Švejk

Author: Taylor, Paul A

Source: European Political Science, Volume 7, Number 3, August 2008 , pp. 335-351(17)

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Abstract:

The Research Assessment Exercise and its successor - the Research Excellence Framework - are examined as contemporary examples of a perversion of academic discourse in British universities that threatens to spread to the rest of Europe. It is claimed that conventional political science is of limited use for understanding the true inanity of such bureaucratic initiatives and instead fiction and psychoanalytical theory are proposed as highly useful intellectual resources with which to understand the truely perverted essence of research bureaucracy. The work of literature-inspired writers such as Žižek, Kafka, Sloterdijk, and Hašek is used to illustrate this claim.European Political Science (2008) 7, 335-351. doi:10.1057/eps.2008.20

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/eps.2008.20

Affiliations: 1: aInstitute of Communication Studies, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK., Email: p.a.taylor@leeds.ac.uk

Publication date: 2008-08-01