What has the market done to our research? Resisting the neoliberalisation of knowledge production through qualitative psychological research

Mulya, Teguh Wijaya (2020) What has the market done to our research? Resisting the neoliberalisation of knowledge production through qualitative psychological research. In: 2020 Critical Psychology Conference in East Asia, February 29th & March 1st, 2020, Tokyo. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Globally, scientific knowledge production has increasingly become a commodity; it is understood, managed, and regulated under the market logic and mechanisms. In Asia, this neoliberal orientation to research has been widely taken up by policymakers, universities, and researchers, including in psychology. Mainsteam psychological research - positivistic, quantitative, and depoliticised - rarely questioned such commodification since psychology itself has increasingly become an apparatus of capitalist power in creating and governing docile subjects. In this paper I firstly represent some anecdotal moments in my experience as a psychology researcher in Indonesia (where neoliberalism, as in many other Asian countries, largely goes uncontested) to demonstrate how knowledge production has been reduced to an entrepreneurial game of competition, networking, and metric optimisation. My focus will be on psychology researchers’ ways of being producers of knowledge, and discourses given rise to their subjectivity. Secondly, I explore possibilities to disrupt the dominant free-market logics and ways of being a researcher through my engagement with qualitative research students. I argue that, instead of detached, commodified, and audit-oriented (or impact factor-oriented, to be precise), qualitative psychological research provides a space to engage with knowledge production as embodied and relational. As demonstrated by these research students, research could be understood as an avenue for self-discovery, (re)connecting with others in a deeper level, and even spiritual journey. By exploring, identifying, and circulating these alternative subjectivities and discourses, it is hoped that hegemonic neoliberal discourses constituting psychological research practice become more possible to be disrupted, destabilised, and even subverted.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions: Faculty of Psychology > Department of Psychology
Depositing User: Teguh Wijaya Mulya205905
Date Deposited: 08 Apr 2022 05:11
Last Modified: 11 Aug 2023 02:53
URI: http://repository.ubaya.ac.id/id/eprint/41709

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