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Marina Blagojevic, Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery: A Gender Perspective (Belgrade: Institut za kriminoloska i socioloska istrazivanja, 2009), 260 pp., (pb), ISBN 978-86-83287-36-9.
Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery presents the concept of a necessary connection among theory, research, and policy while providing insight into the relationships among knowledge production, gender, and locality. The book contains an introduction, conclusion, and seven chapters, which consider various difficulties that women scientists from the semiperiphery have faced in the process of knowledge production. The author defines semiperiphery, positioned between the center and the periphery, as "essentially shaped by the effort to catch up with the core, on one hand, and to resist the integration into the core, so not to lose its cultural characteristics" (33-34). Blagojevic affirms that localization influences the concept of scientific excellence by pushing women out of the margins of a respectful career. From the perspective of the core, the semiperiphery is "different and not similar enough" and should be improved by imitating the already developed models available in the core. Such a neocolonial approach, argues Blagojevic, suppresses development of new paradigms coming from the semiperiphery, which has been in a state of permanent reform meaning that "one reform is following the other while the previous one has not been finalized, nor its effects explored" (36). These issues are carefully examined in the first chapter-"Non-...