Science and its Others: examining the discourse about scientific misconduct through a postcolonial lens

This article investigates the current discourse about scientific misconduct from a postcolonial perspective. It traces the development of a causal story about scientific misconduct, blaming misconduct on so-called foreign scientific cultures said to be most prevalent among developing countries. The paper attempts to show how the discourse on misconduct is structured by themes and logics of coloniality as well as diverges from them, exhibiting shifting categorisations and images of the Other, which oscillate between the Other as a backwards savage and the Other as an advanced machine. Such contradictory categorisations will be argued to be both interpretable as movements to abandon prevailing ideologies of efficiency and progress within science and to make science more inclusive as well as means to uphold and re-establish existing patterns of coloniality in the face of historical changes both within and outside of academic research.