Knowledge, Normativity and Power in Academia

Wissenschaft ist zwangsläufig Teil der bestehenden Ordnung. Dennoch bieten sich Räume des Widerstands. Aber wie ist die Beziehung zwischen Wissen, Normativität und Macht in der Wissenschaft ausgestaltet? Neben der kritischen Analyse der Machtbeziehungen im akademischen Alltag liegt ein weiterer Fokus des Bandes auf künstlerischen Formen der Wissensproduktion, die danach streben, mit den gängigen wissenschaftlichen Ausdrucksformen zu brechen.

Auteur
Aisha-Nusrat Ahmad ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin an der International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin. Maik Fielitz ist wiss. Mitarbeiter am Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft in Jena. Johanna Leinius ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin an der Universität Kassel. Gianna Magdalena Schlichte ist wiss. Mitarbeiterin am Bremer Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction: Critical Interventions in Knowledge Production from Within and Without Academia Aisha-N. Ahmad, Maik Fielitz, Johanna Leinius and Gianna M. Schlichte Where We Begin The conditions for conducting critical research have deteriorated globally in the recent decades, which consequently poses fundamental challenges for emancipatory knowledge production. First, the neoliberalization of the university, understood as the permeation of the logic of economic utility and the increasing marketization of knowledge (see Brown 2015), has contributed to enlarging the gap between the production of academic knowledge and its transformative potential for emancipatory social change. Generally evaluated in accordance with its immediate use for advancing national economies or stabilizing political systems, academic knowledge production is, secondly, becoming increasingly decentralized. Specialized research centers with predefined agendas and unclear mandates, with far greater financing and influence than public universities, have mushroomed, thereby diluting academia's independence from the interference of the state and private sector. Third, the recent political shift to the right across the Americas, Europe and Asia, along with the establishment of authoritarian figures in leading liberal democracies, has revitalized the debate on the normative basis of critical research as newly established disciplines within the social sciences are coming to be deemed irrelevant and pseudoscientific. The allegation that critical research indulges in the creation of escapist ghettos for like-minded people, while broad swaths of the population are endorsing protectionism, nativism and isolation, has become an oft-repeated comment on the state of critical research. The current setting has placed scholars pursuing a critical and emancipatory agenda at a crossroads: On the one hand, and in tandem with the increasingly aggressive anti-academic discourse fueled by far-right ideologues and consumerist mainstream attitudes, the de-centralization of academic knowledge production has put the progressive promise offered by academia in peril. While the close overlap of teaching and research at public universities has ensured to a certain extent, the social and political relevance of academic knowledge, academic research has become deeply compartmentalized within separate disciplines. The spaces in which knowledge is created have multiplied and are no longer confined to the university: a multiplicity of research institutes, think tanks and other organizations are creating and disseminating academic knowledge. At the same time, however, research results are rarely communicated in an approachable form and language. On the other hand, the expansion of academia has also enlarged the spaces of academic knowledge production, which may generate competing ideas about the potential for effecting broader social transformation. The inherent need to justify research approaches and results potentially exposes academic knowledge production-wherever it is produced and disseminated-to critique from approaches pursuing a normative emancipatory agenda. Against this backdrop, we distinctly position this volume as an intervention into the prevailing atmosphere of control and enclosure that has imposed itself at the crossroads of politics and academia. We argue that there is a need for academia to articulate an emancipatory perspective and approach which challenges the dichotomies and hierarchies that inhibit the achievement of social justice and equality. The purpose of this volume is put forth an understanding of academia as a normative order that adheres to certain rules of self-justification (Forst and Günther 2011, 15-20) and to reflect on the repercussions of this paradigmatic shift, not only in regards to the practice and norms of knowledge production but also for the sake of identifying possibilities for critique itself, without or within academia. Approaching academic knowledge production as a normative order means acknowledging the complex and at times ambivalent processes of critical knowledge production within the plurality of spaces and locations which together constitute academia. As such, the volume is an attempt to explore "a place for science between an impossible certainty and an interminable decon-struction, a science of both reference and mistrust, a science possible after our disappointments in science." (Lather 2007, 1) We set out to critically engage with how knowledge is created and dissemi-nated in academia-and hence with the very conditions of our day-to-day work-, with its effects and, consequently, with the very setting of our in-tervention (not least resulting from a critical engagement with the heritage of the Frankfurt School). As, for all of us, endeavoring to critique always implies a reflection of one's own inevitable embeddedness in the reproduction of the very normative orders we strive to critique (see Forst 2015, 17), scrutinizing our positionality within academia from Campus Westend in Frankfurt, Germany is the starting point of our endeavor. In a building with the capital letters NORMATIVE ORDERS affixed on the entrance-located on Max Horkheimer Street, not far from Theodor W. Adorno Square-, our location provided us with the impetus to scrutinize the Frankfurt School's stance on the invariably political nature of scholarship. This necessarily involves a serious consideration the role of knowledge in legitimizing violence and contributing to the perpetration of atrocities: the campus is located on the former premises of the IG-Farben Company, which, during the Second World War, profited massively from the slave labor performed by concentration camp prisoners, and which produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers through its affiliated firm, Degussa. We invite you to follow us on a journey through a selection of the times and places in which scholarship has turned its critical gaze onto itself or has been forced to do so by actors and processes beyond academia. All the while, we ask how the critical sting of emancipatory research can be directed towards the heart of an ever-more enclosed environment. This volume discusses the hierarchies and exclusionary practices within academia that reproduce certain ontological and epistemological perspectives along with certain forms of knowledge while relegating others to the margins. It also highlights the critical potential of interventions originating within and without academia. Instead of providing definite answers, we strive to open a space which fosters the critical self-reflexivity of academia by providing room for a variety of voices and practices to enter the debate. The introduction to the volume aims to outline the scope in which these encounters take place. We first turn to the origins of the Frankfurt School and its debates surrounding the role knowledge in the transformation of society, juxtaposing this with more recent interventions spearheaded by postcolonial and feminist scholars. In an attempt to think through the challenges and potentials of crit…