When values meet infrastructure: negotiating equity in international research collaboration

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Dr Victoria Anker presented her paper, When values meet infrastructure: negotiating equity in international research collaboration, at this year’s International Research Culture Conference (IRCC26).

Drawing on her experience of managing and contributing to international research collaborations, Victoria explored what happens when commitments to equitable partnership encounter the administrative, financial and governance infrastructures through which research is delivered.

The presentation introduced a provisional “values-in-practice” lens, examining the relationship between the values researchers and funders explicitly endorse - such as equity, partnership, reciprocity and care - and the values embedded in institutional systems, including compliance, accountability, risk management and standardisation.

Through three observations from project implementation, Victoria considered how standardised processes can have different consequences across institutional contexts; how the systems of one institution can become the infrastructure through which an international partnership operates; and how responsibility for negotiating these tensions often falls to project managers and coordinators who have limited authority to change the underlying systems.

The presentation concluded by suggesting that research culture is produced not only through policies and formal commitments, but also through the everyday infrastructures that make research possible. It posed three questions for further reflection: whose values are embedded in research infrastructures, what happens when those infrastructures encounter different institutional contexts and forms of authority, and what it would mean to treat infrastructure itself as part of the culture that needs to change.

IRCC26 was organised by the University of Warwick’s National Centre for Research Culture, with the theme Collaboration for Lasting Change.

Find out more about the International Research Culture Conference 2026.