The risky business of research: The control of academic knowledge production and racialized, gendered, and sexualized contours of corporate power

• In Event: Researching Corporate, State, and Right-Wing Power: the Uneven Power Dynamics between Academics, Activists & Powerful Actors

Proposal

Critiquing corporate power is a risky business. For decades, activists, journalists, and academics have sought to expose the exploitative practices of transnational corporations and their entanglements with state powers across an array of industries (Cravey 2004; Sadler 2004). These exploits include labour abuses; human rights violations; racial, gender, and sexuality-based discrimination and violence; exploitation of Indigenous peoples; environmental destruction; fraud and illegal behavior, among other issues. Yet, efforts to uncover harms are often thwarted by corporate attempts to control these exposures through the manipulation of the truth, legal threats, and violence.

This paper examines attempts to censor academic knowledge production and expertise on corporate power and abuse within a framework of racialised, gendered, and sexualized capitalism (Bacchetta 2007; Federici 2004; Collins 2003; Salzinger 2003; Robinson 2000; Ferreira da Silva 2007; Melamed 2015; Quijano 2000; Willoughby-Herard 2015; Author 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020). It builds on the premise that we must understand the ways in which corporations expand the contours of their power, in part, by actively influencing and distorting knowledge production and distribution through various technologies of control to secure the conditions for their future growth. It builds on and is inspired by the work of anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars working in the traditions of Black, feminist, queer, and Indigenous studies that critique powerful institutions and their often-devastating effects on humans, non-human species, and the environment. In the area of critical corporate studies, their scholarship has attended to corporate abuses across a range of industries, such as tobacco (Benson 2012), food, oil and gas (Cepek 2018; Sawyer 2004; Kimmerling 2006; Watts 2012), mining (Jenkins 2015; Kirsch 2014, 2018, 2022; Welker 2014), and violations that tend to impact particular types of workers, such as janitors (Savage 2016) and factory workers (Wright 2006). In education, scholars have focused on the influence of for-profit companies, philanthropic foundations, and investors in education (Tompkins-Stange 2016; Reckhow 2012; Hook 2022; Author 2018, 2019, forthcoming). These scholars have often written on against the backdrop of threats to their work and well-being (Davis 2004).[1] Particularly relevant to this paper is the scholarship that reflects, often autoethnographically, on the role of publicly-engaged academics (Kirsch 2018), expert testimony by academics (Watts 2011), and legal threats to academics and publishing organisations (Kirsch 2020).

Drawing on my own experience negotiating research access and publication, the paper provides an ethnographically grounded way of illuminating one corporation and its foundation’s attempts to control academic research as the company worked to maintain its hegemony through ongoing exploitation in its business practices. The analysis reveals what antagonisms provoke corporate control of information on its business and philanthropic practices, on the gendered and racialised relations that may ease corporate anxiety (Ahmed 2007; Gaztambide-Fernández and Angod 2020), and what ultimately, irrespective of these social relations prompts corporations to protect themselves at all costs, often irrespective of the truth, the environment, and/or human life. In doing so, the paper reveals the racialized, gendered, and classed contours of corporate power and abuse.

Author

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge