Cognitive Justice, Situated Knowledge, and Research Evaluation: Structural Tensions in the Scholarly Production of Rural Education

Abstract

The objective of this study is to analyze the structural tensions that shape the scholarly production on rural education within contemporary architectures of scientific validation, examining how systems of evaluation, indexing, and impact measurement condition the recognition and circulation of situated pedagogical knowledge. Drawing on a qualitative theoretical-analytical approach, an interpretive documentary review of academic literature published between 2020 and 2024 was conducted, selected according to criteria of thematic relevance and peer-reviewed status. The corpus was subjected to an inductive thematic coding process aimed at identifying discursive regularities and interdependent structural configurations in the recent debate. The findings reveal, first, asymmetries in validation criteria that privilege standardization, international visibility, and global translatability, thereby generating differentiated conditions of legitimacy for situated knowledge. Second, a displacement in the conceptual status of territorial knowledges is identified, positioning them in areas of lower theoretical recognition within dominant academic circuits. Third, bibliometric metrics are shown to exert performative effects that influence the configuration of research agendas, methodological decisions, and discursive strategies. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that the difficulties surrounding the legitimization of rural educational knowledge do not stem from intrinsic methodological shortcomings but from evaluative structures that differentially organize scientific recognition. It is concluded that the articulation between cognitive justice, situated knowledge, and scientific validation enables an understanding of contemporary epistemic inequalities as systemic effects of globalized evaluative regimes applied to the field of rural education.