Political Economies of Knowledge Production: On and Around Academic Dependency

Approaches to the study of knowledge production on a global scale have drawn analogies from the study of political economy, namely, the theories of political economic imperialism and economic dependency, the notion of economic extractivism, and capitalism. Thus, we have the conceptualization of intellectual imperialism, academic dependency, academic extractivism and academic capitalism. This essay focuses on two of these phenomenon, that is, intellectual imperialism and academic dependency, suggesting that they refer to different, yet related, problems in global knowledge production. While intellectual imperialism is a crucial starting point for the understanding of knowledge production in the Third World/Periphery/South, it interacts with academic dependency to maintain the underdevelopment of academia in many communities worldwide.