Administered Lives: Scholarly Research, Accountability, and the “Public”

Abstract

Administered Lives: Scholarly Research, Accountability, and the “Public” Imre Szeman (bio) The preface to the social science and humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc) strategic plan for 2006–2011 makes an interesting (if somewhat startling) claim for an organization that distributes research money so that scholars can extend the range and depth of our knowledge.1 “We already possess, or can develop, the knowledge required to build a just, prosperous, sustainable and culturally vibrant world” (2), it asserts. It’s not basic know-how—understood in the Preface to be mainly the domain of science and technology—or even clear ideas about justice and prosperity that we lack and which might thus need further research support. Rather, “our problem, as a civilization, is one of values, of economic and political priorities and of social organization” (2). This is where the humanities and social sciences come in and why they are needed: to help us to sort through the moral, political, and social blockages that impede the implementation of scientific knowledge, technological know-how, and (one suspects) a fully articulated liberal-capitalist state form. The scientists know (for instance) that global warming is a threat [End Page 9] to humanity. The social scientists and humanists are needed presumably to tell us why politicians aren’t implementing policies to address global warming, or why people continue to complain about smog or traffic even while driving, or why we worry about carbon emissions but still thrill to news about the dynamism of Canada’s resource economy and the newfound strength of the dollar. That these are questions of politics that in many ways exceed the domain of scholarship is one thing; what is also worth noting is the way in which the call to relevance repeated throughout the document connects scholarly research with the increasingly efficacious state administration of populations from cradle to grave (Foucauldian governmentality in a nutshell). But it should not really come as a surprise that research monies distributed by the state to the human sciences are intended primarily to help the state sort through the complexities of contemporary social systems, even if it also envelops itself in the easy rhetoric of the defense of civilization and commitment to the promulgation of the Canadian good life. The practice of targeting increasing amounts of research monies to “strategic areas” and to university-industry-community “joint initiatives” is but one sign of this fundamental aim of state-sponsored research.2 Even if it has proven to difficult to stop the slide of research monies toward its uses to biopolitical ends, as scholars we have become adept at identifying and challenging this particular re-definition of our research practices. What has constituted an even greater challenge when it comes to the question of the relevance of research is a related idea—an idea both seductive and dangerous, which circulates broadly within recent sshrc documents and press releases, as well as within the academy and public discourse more generally: the connection (implicit and explicit) between making research public and research accountability. A key component of sshrc’ s vision of itself as a “Knowledge Council” is improved connections between scholarly research and the public. It is assumed from the outset that to date humanities and social sciences knowledge has largely failed to “get out into the world where it can make a difference” (23). Community organizations and the “Canadian public at large” form two of the five nodes of network of relationships within which sshrc functions (19), and the mobilization of knowledge from academic environs outward is [End Page 10] central to how sshrc imagines retooling research in Canada. The Preface says it all: “Canada needs humanities and social sciences research; and Canadian researchers and research institutions, sshrc among them, must do a better job of getting hard-won knowledge out into the world, to families, community groups, policy-makers, legislators, and the media” (2). In turn, as they have already increasingly had to do, researchers in the human sciences have to account for the ways in which the result of their activities will “inform real world debate, enrich intellectual and cultural life, and invigorate the economy” (7). Editorials are by their nature often as...