Privileged biasing and biased privileging: negotiating “useful” knowledge

Abstract (English)

Nothing comes without its own world (Haraway et al., 2018). Our current world is witnessing a narrative of the presence of multiple polarizing forces as though they are battlelines to be drawn. Whether it be Indigeneous vs Western knowledge systems, Feminism vs Men’s rights, woke vs scientific research, left vs right, or any of the other dualisms broadly seen within the “culture war(s)”, a key assumption that lies in all these categorizations is a foundational notion of constructing such knowledge, as though they are either/or choices. We problematize this foundationalist notion of constructing knowledge by building on Derridean hauntology and more specifically, debates within feminist new materialism to construct an apparatus of privileging and biasing which allows us space to show the interconnectedness between the assumptions of such polarizations. Such an apparatus also allows us to deconstruct interactions as occasions of knowledge production/performance in which we envision privileging and
biasing as a simultaneous process through which knowledge gets produced/performed. Connecting this larger theoretical frame to the present discourses surrounding categorization, we show that the issue of categorization is not in rejecting one foundation for another but rather
in understanding what knowledge is useful and how that usefulness comes into being. We join the ongoing debates within Management and Organization Studies on the politics of “useful knowledge” by centering knowledge production/performance within the interaction and
questioning how “usefulness” gets negotiated within the infinite possibilities of the interaction through this process of simultaneous privileging and biasing. We envision such an apparatus could allow us to potentially develop a nuanced understanding of how usefulness gets negotiated within interactions and allow us to think about mechanisms to understand and address the current polarizations around us.