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

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel includes a series of papers that reflect academics’ experiences of critiquing powerful actors, including the State, corporations, and right-wing movements and institutions. 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.

This critical scholarship has attended to corporate abuses across a range of industries, such as tobacco (Benson 2012), food (Chatterjee 2001; Sen 2017), manufacturing (Author 1 2018), oil and gas (Cepek 2018; Sawyer 2004; Kimmerling 2006; Watts 2012; Kunz 2020), mining (Jenkins 2015; Kirsch 2014, 2018, 2022; Welker 2014), and violations that tend to impact particular types of precarious workers, such as janitors (Savage 2016) and factory workers (Wright 2006). These scholars have often written against the backdrop of threats to their work and well-being (Davis 2004).

Scholars emerging from these critical traditions have also critiqued state powers, particularly state-sponsored colonialism, war, genocide, racial apartheid and segregation, gender and sexual-based violence, expropriation of Indigenous lands, and police violence (Author 2 2019; Grande, 2015; Pulido 2017; Shange, 2019), and right-wing movements (Bacchetta & Powers 2007; Miller-Idriss 2009). Recently, there has also been a resurgence of studies on right-wing movements (Caiani et al., 2012), which are almost always deeply entangled in both state and corporate power. There is also a literature and critical theoretical tradition that examines the relative autonomy of the state (Poulantzas 1968; Skocpol et al. 1995) and the possibilities for social movements and communities to promote participatory governance in (Baiocchi, 2005; Fung & Wright, 2003) and/or the contentions co-governance of (Author 4 2019) state institutions, and the extent to which these processes can result in more just economic and political conditions for diverse communities

In education, in particular, scholars have focused on the influence of for-profit companies, philanthropic foundations, and investors in education (Tompkins-Stange 2016; Reckhow 2012; Author 3 2023; Author 1 2018, forthcoming; Authors 1 & 2 2020), often with regards to their deep entanglements with state power and public finance (Allweiss 2021). There is also a body of literature that examines the possibilities for resistance within and through schooling, while taking seriously the histories of colonialism, racialized and gendered economic exploitation, and state authoritarianism that shape the possibilities for progressive change (Kamat, 2002; Author 4, 2019; Willis, 1977).

Particularly relevant to this symposium is the scholarship that reflects, often autoethnographically, on the role of publicly-engaged academics (Kirsch 2018), activist research, expert testimony by academics (Watts 2011), and legal threats to academics and publishing organisations (Kirsch 2020).

The first paper examines attempts to censor academic knowledge production and expertise on corporate power and abuse within a framework of racialised, gendered, and sexualized capitalism.

The second paper critically examines a recent results-based financing educational reform in West Africa that outsources public primary schools to largely international for-profit providers, and which was to be scaled via a randomized control trial (RCT). The paper analyzes how the data captured in the RCT and by other means was gathered, used, and at-times manipulated by corporate actors and investors to protect investments and delegitimize local resistance to and independent research of the policy.

The third paper, drawing from proposed state house legislations, school district policies, and ethnographic data from a year-long study of two high schools in politically conservative counties, contributes to this charge by focusing on the workings of right-wing power via education and builds on scholarship on recruitment and radicalization of youth into right-wing extremism and on recent scholarship tracing the rise of fascist politics and increased right-wing motivated hostilities in schools.

The fourth paper examines the social and political pathways of Black youth who organized across the #BlackLivesMatter and #EndSARS movements of 2020 in the United States and Nigeria. Based on ongoing collaborative research and solidarity within both movements, this paper considers the factors, which played a contributing role in developing the capacity of young organizers and their trajectories as activists, as well as the challenges and possibilities of research on/in social movements as an ethical research practice.

Sub Unit

• 21st Century Educational Alternatives: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Patriarchy, Militarism, and the Climate Crisis

Organizer

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

Chair

• Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

Individual Presentations

• The risky business of research: The control of academic knowledge production and racialized, gendered, and sexualized contours of corporate power - Kathryn Moeller, University of Cambridge

• Research on/in Black Youth Movements: Navigating State Violence and Scholar- Activist Researcher Roles within Pan-African Resistance - R. Nanre Nafziger, McGill University; Krystal Strong, Rutgers University

Discussant

• Sangeeta G. Kamat, Univ of Massachusetts Amherst