Abstract:
The author is interested in the new segmentation of university knowledge and, more precisely, in the unequal access to knowledge of the different universities (scientific communities, networks) in the Bulgarian transition to a knowledge-based society. The goal is to understand how the new educational and scientific differentiations are taking place, how the stratification and polarization takes place of winning and losing universities, winning and losing academic paths, center and periphery.
What is analysed are only the ways in which the new positions have been interpreted by those involved in the accelerated academic reform and policies that exert enormous institutional and symbolic violence and rapidly polarizing the European Research Area. The emphasis is not so much on the objective positions of this area but on the participants’ own classifications, on the logics in which they class and name them, in which they think their chances: on that ‘almost magical power to give names and cause existing by virtue of giving names’ (Bourdieu).
The article – using concepts and studies of the critical Bourdieusian paradigm – is based on several quantitative empirical studies (and, above all, an international comparative study of 2006). The collected empirical material is used to reveal seven meaning configurations, seven ‘glocal’ narratives’.
