Five - Research: Setting Terms

Summary

If knowledge is power, then the places where knowledge is produced are important sites to examine. They can shape how technologies and discourses develop. Intertwined with the power and discourses of technology companies and states, academia and research agendas also shape, legitimize and entrench trustification narratives. The ivory tower has its foundations in the same need for trust, for legitimacy to support its privileged position, a position not as detached as it is often portrayed. It too relies on stories of evidence, numbers and measurement to extract its power and privilege, from states, corporations and publics. The role of academia in defining technology discourse makes it important to consider how the legitimacy of experts and the results of research are performed as worthy of trust. The global research community (though the term community is stretched here) shifts trust onto methods, institutions and the norms and dominant power structures that shape knowledge production.

There is a long, colonial (as well as racist, heteropatriarchal and ableist) history of reverence afforded to the scientific method and claims of objectivity. Today this has shaped much of how technologies like AI and data are conceptualized and performed. This is significant, as ‘methods constitute the things they claim to represent’ (Kennedy et al, 2022: 393) while participants, who also shape results, are largely excluded from the same level of consideration (2022: 409–10) even as these methods perform the same values into discourses of society more widely.

In the US, for example, universities played a legitimizing role in sustaining mythologies of settler colonialism, carried forward to contemporary policing and surveillance of any counter discourses that emerge from universities. As Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira write, ‘ “imperial cartographies” can be traced through the meshed contours of research methods and scholarly theories’ (2014). This perpetuates the ‘empires of knowledge’, which continue to be built on ‘racial statecraft, militarized science, and enduring notions of civilizational superiority’. Taken together, this constitutes ‘the many different ways white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought’ (Weheliye, 2014: 63). These processes, assumptions and framings embody a sort of quantification in terms of who or what ‘counts’ as valid for academic freedom or recognition.