Presentation ADI Workshop

Presentation ADI workshop

Dan V. Hirslund

Dear panelists and dear Manuela who has so generously agreed to read your papers and enrich our conversation with some thoughts along the way and, in particular, in our last session where there will be time to think about how these great papers in different ways address the workshop theme.

I would like to personally thank you all, first of all for coming, and secondly for the extremely stimulating papers you have prepared for today. I opened up one conversation and you have taken this opening in all kinds of different directions that far exceed the vision I started out with and which qualifies the discussion on research for change. I would like to believe that this is not just a matter of academic shoplifting - of efforts at inserting oneself in a crowded space by creatively, but uncritically, hooking on to pre-existing themes. Rather I think that these different engagements with the panel theme reflect serious engagements with how to make, not just research products, but the problematic of making academic knowledge speak into more general issues of vulnerabilities in the fields we study or, indeed as Sourav Kargupta reminds us, among ourselves. As researchers within a predominantly humanitarian tradition, we are already bound up with the world in which we study through the multiple, overlapping and, at times, conflicting roles we fill out. The question is therefore not how we disentangle ourselves but rather how we make ourselves further useful.

I want to take this opportunity to raise some themes that might be useful in our discussions today but first a few practical notes. We have a generous six hours for our panel with 8 presentations and I hope this creates the space necessary for exploring some of the many thorny questions confronting research seeking to chart a path in the empirical field where it is occupied. ... For those of you joining us without preparation: welcome, and we look very much forward to your suggestions and feedback to individual papers as well as to the general questions raised by the panel as well. It might be useful just to iterate that the idea with this panel, called "research for change", is to explore ways in which research can be relevant in the fields we study beyond the somewhat simplistic arithmetic of "impact" or in the provision of mere input to policy. In the European public context, at least, researchers are increasingly asked to reach out beyond their specialisation to provide either journalistic accounts of their results or by giving technical advicewhile being expected to perform as neutral experts. I find this position puzzling: what exactly does neutrality mean when fielding recommendations to powerful states or businesses with little influence over the ways in which expertise is put to use?

Instead, this panel takes the opposite approach. Researchers are deeply submerged in the politics of knowledge around which academic production unfolds and when they work on contemporary human issues, they will also be participants in the relational fields they study. The politics of the unfolding of life in its manifold forms is a crucial component of what we explore and are inserted in. Research is, in this sense, a utopic enterprise: it brings into the horizon new understandings and can point towards other ways of arranging life. What we seek to do here is therefore to take this very political starting point of research and explore what it might mean to actively engage our knowledge in ways that bring about different futures. What are the paths that the knowledge we help generate might open up to and through what kinds of collaborations can we assist co-author concrete and positive social change, whatever that might mean in our different fields.So, to return for a moment to a practical question, what we are looking for in the papers, are not just a deeper understanding of the empirical content presented, although this is always important. We are looking in particular to the links between theoretical questions, or propositions, and empirical potentiality: to how these particular ways of understanding a problematic might become a new opening. In this sense, the ambition of what I think we are seeking to accomplish here is indeed utopic, just as good research always is.

Before we start, I would like to point towards three conversations that might be helpful when debating how research might be thought of as a form of intervention.

The first concernsthe idea of the ethics of research, which has developed to become anentire field within the discipline of anthropology but which reflects wider academic trends in connecting universities with societies. It is maybe instructive, in this regard, to recall how the very establishment and early development of the modern university system in Europe and US with its specific disciplinary boundaries grew out of the new nation-states' demand for a legitimising national history and a 'scientific' approach to industrial development. But the critical urge to using science against policies of the state first developed with in the wake of anti-colonial struggles and the related rise of Marxist theory in the arts and social sciences. Since then, with the rather abrupt rejection of Marxism and the coming of a "postmodern ethics", debates on the power of knowledge shifted to concern the problematic authority with which scholars represented their fields in incomplete ways, thus paving the way for a multivocal and decentered approach in which the holistic vision of the researcher was disassembled, if not shattered. James Carrier calls this the rise of "neoliberal anthropology" due to its preference for the contingent, individual and experience-based and the rejection of grand theory. Still, within this moment, a new form of critique has awoken, which has sought to chart a militant ethics based on clear alliances with the people we study and a call for making research an occasion for studying the marginalised and powerless. It has, according to the title of one book, become the era for "taking sides" against multifarous forms of local and global injustices.

We have thus a rich vocabulary on positioning research with regards to the world in which it is embedded and this provides an important pool of resources to further think about what research interventions can accomplish and the difficulties involved in such projects. Let me just add two closing remarks to closing remarks to this brief discussion on ethics. My own position on how to best conceive of the relationship to the history of ethical thinking is that research for change could be approached not through the idea of forging specific alliances - i.e. are we loyal to the states who fund our research or to the fields in which we work? - but through a rigorous conception of the long-term impacts of particular research programs. This means shifting the question of focus not to the immediate empirical problems but rather to the wider constellation in which particular issues appear as problems and then further to the question of how to identify significance around the production and reproduction of the human condition. I have conceptualised this perspective as "analytical activism" to stress the importance of analysis as a form of action where activism captures the urge to make itself relevant in the world, to become a thrust in the ethico-political fabric of societies.

The second brief remark I would make in closing this short conversation with ethics is that the development of a language of the role of research in society should be seen as embedded within specific historical and regional contexts and the short sketch I offered of the concept of ethics in anthropology is peculiar to Euro-American anthropology and then possibly only the American and British parts of it. The role of university knowledge within other disciplines and in other post-colonial settings have most likely been very different from the one sketched here and bringing in these different histories and conceptualisations of the researcher and research would be very helpful in furthering our understanding of a reconceptualised notion of academic impact. Regional research traditions and disciplinary boundaries are not an asset to the project envisioned here and should therefore be approached as points of dialogue rather than points of defence.

My two remaining reflections will be much shorter. The first one concerns the question of what sort of knowledge is useful for addressing issues we identify. There is, of course, a much more complicated discussion on the very nature of knowledge but we will leave that for another time. However, it seems to me, that one of the stumbling blocks confronting an expanded understanding of academia's role in society, as mentioned, is the predominant understanding of 'impact' and 'relevance' tied to the languages of journalism and technical expertise. James Scott, the American political scientist, famously popularised the distinctions between techne, episteme and metis in order to criticise centralised, bureaucratic planning for failing to take into account the contingent and complex realities of actual systems. Technical knowledge is universal and impersonal whereas epistemic is universal and rational. Epistemic knowledge, on the other hand, is specific, partisan and local. We do not need to replicate Scott's problematic between rationalism and localism which concerned a critique specific to a different period and which we can now see contained the early signs of Scott's anarchist sensibilities. But Scott's critique of rationalism does remind us of the pitfalls in aligning academic knowledge with bureaucratic regimes and a recurring challenge for the conversations we are engaging in here must be to sharpen our understanding of what different types of knowledge can do and to be wary of the kind of prehistories to particular, and hegemonic, forms of knowledge-production. I suggest that a knowledge geared to tackling empirical challenges must be both macroscopic, specific and robust and be able to separate itself from public conceptualisations without seeking to be universal.

Lastly, how do we link precarity in academia, including funding for the humanities, with efforts at building the kind of robust knowledge that can matter outside academia as well? If we currently live through a paradigm of heigthened speed of research and less attention to long-term outcomes, both for individuals and the knowledge produced, with more fragmentation and duplicity in thinking, what kind of institutionalisation can help foster knowledge formations more supportive of generating a longitudinal understanding, critique and resonance with social, political and environmental questions? This might seem like an odd point to raise but there are two reasons why I think it is relevant to flag here. One has to do with what Bourdieu identified as the reproduction of social capital to which higher education is particularly prone. This sociological model suggests that it is through status that integration into academic positions are accomplished and that what matters in this regard is the combination of class status and an economy of diplomatic distribution. It is a cynical view but one worth recalling as research careers are increasingly being crafted around a winner-takes-it-all production cyclus. What this means, in a nutshell, is not only that merit, beyond its self-ascription, has little impact on how universities get populated but more importantly that universities are really bad places for new ideas since they threaten the carefully distributed power balance of positions. Second, with the increased competition over positions in the humanities and social sciences in the austerity-ridden western economies, the formula of status-economy and employment has become even more punitive. This has made it very easy to excommunicate alternative visions for how to conceptualised importance in academic work. This is not only a bad thing as the increased absurdity of university should give pause and open up for all kinds of conversations on the future of both academic knowledge and the institutional support that might be developed.It therefore seems that conversations on how research can be mobilised for the benefit of human and non-human societies will benefit from considering the particular political crucible within which questions of academic knowledge and careers are placed.