The Master's Tools: Exposing Rejecting, and Appropriating
The Master's Tools: Exposing Rejecting, and Appropriating
Our theme this year, “The Master’s Tools: Exposing, Rejecting, and Appropriating,” aims to engage with Audre Lorde’s provocative claim:
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.”
Our intent is to turn a critical eye toward current ideas about how to eradicate inequality and, in the process, to engender new ones. Even as many activists and academics continue to wrestle with whether and how “master’s tools” can be turned toward liberatory ends, powerful new strategies and technologies are reshaping work and life in potentially emancipatory ways. Many of these redeployments and innovations are aimed at advancing equality. Which of these tools hold promise, and which are fundamentally incompatible with that goal?
As educators, scholars, and practitioners, we participate in—and, in many ways, are of—systems of inequality. Our very venue, Harvard Business School, is, to many minds, the quintessential “master’s tool.” Our conference, therefore, will be an exercise in inhabiting the very question we pose as our topic. Our hope is that having this conversation at HBS will help push us to reckon with the theme in productive ways.