Centre-periphery relations and academic autonomy in Latin American social sciences: critical comments

The volume edited by Fernanda Beigel is positioned at the intersection of various strands of literature such as sociology of science, sociology of intellectuals and internationalization or globalization of the social sciences. It integrates various debates and enriches them with in-depth, historical studies provided by experts in the domain. It provides a conceptual differentiation of the ubiquitous term "academic autonomy" by contrasting it with its various opposites (heteronomy, dependency), by differentiating between its intranational and its international as well as between its disciplinary dimensions. Apart from highlighting the intraregional variety of cases and thus differentiating the concept of "the periphery", the book thus also manages to restore the agency of the peripheral actors that purely structural analyses tend to overlook. This could only be done convincingly through a set of empirical studies. They clearly show that academic exchange, however unequal, is not unilateral.