Complicity as infiltration: the (im)possibilities of research with/in NSF engineering grants in the age of neoliberal scientism

Daza, Stephanie Lynn (2012) Complicity as infiltration: the (im)possibilities of research with/in NSF engineering grants in the age of neoliberal scientism. Qualitative inquiry, 18 (9). 773-786.. ISSN 1077-8004

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Abstract

In this article, I use a Spivakian decolonizing perspective to take simplification to task in two ways—the simplification of methodology with/in grants and the simplification of critique that skirts the impossibility of noncomplicitous research and researchers. I posit that neoliberal scientism’s grants culture is colonizing research—narrowly defining what is and is not knowledge production and who are and are not researchers. I argue that qualitative research/ers might infiltrate grants culture and then work from within to make the messiness of science visible in a way that makes neoliberal scientism’s “(ab)-use” of science its own undoing (Spivak, 1999). In this sense, I reframe complicity as infiltration, but recognize that complicities are neither equal nor uniform across researchers, projects, or contexts.