Bureaucracy and audit are an increasingly pervasive fact of scientific and academic life. In this article, I examine this bureaucracy through the perspectives of non-faculty staff at a Chinese research institute: the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF). I build upon the lament of a staff member called Tao that inflexible bureaucracy is the…[Read more]

Expectations that research should not only generate real-world impacts but do so in a way that provides “value-for-money” pervade academia and the contemporary knowledge economy. In agricultural research for development, this imperative has spawned “tools” that promise rapidly scalable scientific knowledge on everything from gender inequal…[Read more]

Demands for research to generate impact, along with proliferating institutional regimes for evaluating impact, are a ubiquitous aspect of contemporary scientific practice. Based on participant observation at an agro-environmental research institute in southwest China, this article explores three iterations of a tool for planning and evaluating…[Read more]

“Ideal theorists” in contemporary liberal political theory argue that we can only arrive at a conception of what our most important political values require by reference to an imagined ideal state of affairs and that we must therefore, to some extent, engage in utopian thinking. Critical theorists, from Marx and the Frankfurt School, have tra…[Read more]