Meta Cramer
PhD project: “Making Social Knowledge in a Post-Colonial World Order. Research and Career Practices of Social Scientists in the Anglophone Caribbean”
The Dissertation analyses global inequalities and colonial legacies of knowledge production based on a case study of Anglo-Caribbean social scientists’ research and career practices. As the global political order was reconfigured since the decolonisation period, the academic system was and is shaped by post-colonial power structures and a dominance of knowledge production in former colonial metropoles. This represents a challenging situation for social scientists in the Global South, who navigate global asymmetries in their career and research practices. While contributions to postcolonial sociology, Decoloniality, and Southern Theory have critically analysed colonial legacies and global inequalities in the production and circulation of knowledge over the last decades, the practical dimension of knowledge production – as studied in the sociology of science and science studies – often remains overlooked and this book brings the two fields together.
Colonial legacies and global inequalities of knowledge production are investigated for the case of Caribbean social scientists’ research and career practices. Based on interviews with senior social scientists at the regional University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, I investigate the work practices of publishing, teaching, collaborative of this scholarly community embedded within global asymmetries. The analysis is theorised in a middle-range analytical concept of ‘Negotiation Zones of Knowledge’ that emphasises the creative work practices of scholars based in the South within global inequalities and colonial legacies. A monograph based on the dissertation will be published by Bristol University Press in October 2025.
Current research project
I am a Senior Researcher at the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, working in an international collaborative project on “Predatory Publishing Practices”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The project examines the relationship between publication practices and cultures and national evaluation systems from a global perspective and aims to understand how norms of good and bad publishing are collectively constructed and negotiated.
More broadly put, my work revolves around the (self-)governance and (global) inequalities of science with a particular emphasis on transnational dynamics. This includes thinking about research evaluation regimes and how they affect the work practices of scholars, disciplinary and regional publishing cultures, entrenched institutional and global inequalities and in doing so, building on critical social theory.
Publications
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Cramer, M. (2025) Colonial Legacies and Global Inequalities in the Anglo-Caribbean. Negotiating Social Knowledge Production in Research and Career-Making. Bristol University Press, forthcoming.
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Cramer, M. & Reinhart, M. (preprint) Governing Science through Evaluation: A Global Heuristic of Research Evaluation Regimes, zenodo.
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Cramer, Meta (2024) Lektionen aus der New World Group: Anglophon-karibische Sozialwissenschaften in den 1960er Jahren aus wissenschaftssoziologischer Perspektive. in Santos, Fabio; Ruvituso, Clara (Hrsg.) Globale Soziologie. Vergessene Theorien, verflochtene Geschichten. Springer VS.
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Cramer, Meta (2024) Lyrisches Theoretisieren kolonialer Herrschaft bei Trutz v. Trotha. in Annicker, Fabian; Armbruster, André (Hrsg.) Die Praxis soziologischer Theoriebildung. Springer VS.
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Cramer, Meta (2023) Colonial Scholars and Anti-Colonial Agents: Politics of Academic Knowledge Production Between the West Indies and London in the Mid-20th Century. in Sociology Lens 36(2), p. 208–222 (Open Access).
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Cramer, Meta (2022) Theorising the Caribbean against the grain. How West Indian social scientists established the Caribbean as a space of knowledge production in the 1950s. in Sociedade e Estado 37(3) p. 835-859 (Open Access).
