Lately I’ve been really demotivated in terms of working/studying. And it really got me thinking about why I’m doing everything that I’m currently trying to do. So I want to write a post about my current goals, future ambitions and my purpose in all of it. Along with a critical perspective on academia.

I’ve had several dream jobs while growing up. Ranging from being a secret agent to being a writer, a doctor, or a lawyer. Actually deep down inside I still want to be a secret agent haha :) So in high school, I had decided on becoming a doctor and my plan was actually to specialize in psychiatry or neurology and then to join Doctors Without Borders. Well, I never became a doctor so that didn’t happen. I turned to social sciences. While I was studying literature, I was quite active with side projects. Of these the most memorable one was working with Romani children in a “ghetto” neighborhood, trying to organize educational and fun activities for them every Sunday. I really loved the children and the amazing people I worked with. I worked briefly with Syrian children and tried to help them in their classes in Turkey. I volunteered for a project in Algeria to work with children staying at hospitals even though that project wasn’t exactly well-organized. And then when I came back to Turkey I wanted to contribute to similar projects in Istanbul so I worked at AIESEC for a while with the incoming volunteers and interns. I organized a summer project that promotes youth involvement in NGOs with a small team, one of the most stressful experiences of my life but it was also super fun. Even in school, I wrote all my papers on some kind of social inequality. I remember one of my best papers was an analysis of the character of Othello who is one of the first protagonists in Western literature that isn’t white. Social problems always attracted me and I guess I always had the feeling that it is my humane mission to make the world a better place somehow. Because how can you just see all the injustice in the world and ignore it? I don’t get it. But I always felt like I was only scratching the surface of so many super complex problems, and I really wasn’t getting anywhere with it. I was disappointed in NGO/volunteer work because it was so hard to do anything considering they are not profit-oriented enterprises. It was a lot of disappointment. You work for an organization fully aware that you could earn better elsewhere and you give it your best in non-ideal conditions and you barely get any result. The results you do get, it’s so hard to measure that you don’t really know your impact. So, these organizations can’t compete in a capitalist profit-oriented system. That’s a whole other topic and I even have a paper on it. I should also upload that actually. Anyway, I felt like I could do something more or better but I didn’t really know how. I was interested in transferring to Psychology. I found it exhilarating to try to understand how the human mind works, to understand people and their lives and their decisions. But along the way, I fell in love with Sociology because it gave me the opportunity to dive deep into the structural, collective reasons as to why our world is the way it is. When you understand the history, the structures, the patterns you get a feeling for what went wrong. And my current opinion is that social sciences are all extremely interconnected, they study the same phenomena but with different perspectives that each offer valuable insight into different aspects of those collective phenomena. I decided that I’m good at learning, then I will learn as much as I can about all the wrong in the world, and that way I can find an in-depth, effective solution, or more accurately contribute to one of the many possible solutions. I wanted to go to the core of our problems and sociology seemed to be the perfect way to do that.

So I started my journey, absolutely loving it and I think I did a good job in embracing the sociological perspective and imagination. It’s become second nature almost, I can’t step out of my sociologist shoes anymore. It makes life a bit hard, I can’t ignore the problems I see around me which is a hard burden to bear. But I don’t really want to anyway. I learned a beautiful new word: “Weltschmerz.” This is a word I’ve been looking for, from what I understand it means the pain you feel from thinking about all the injustice in the world. So beautiful! I feel it all the time, nice to know that I’m not so alone in this feeling and that there is even a word for it.

I started my master’s degree in sociology in Germany and I was in for a surprise. Because for some reason it feels like I’m studying data science at a business school. Not the kind of sociology I’m used to at all. I was warned about the quantitativeness, and I was up for the challenge but I didn’t realize how this affects the topics we discuss, what we are “allowed” to say and what isn’t scientific enough. Apparently, it’s so hard to say anything in academia. If you want to say something then you have to read all the previous literature on the topic and prove “scientifically” or “quantitatively” that your hypothesis is true. And there’s constant pressure to specialize so that I have to ignore my curiosity about lots of other things. Not even other fields, things also in Sociology. I’m actually curious about the sociology of gender and queer theory, radical Marxist feminism, (recently) immigration, the sociology of drugs and psychedelics, social practices of primitive societies, criminology, the sociology of emotions, organizational theory, the sociology of work and labor, the sociology of science, the sociology of mental health etc. You get the picture. Not only do I not get to learn about all of these at once, we just don’t talk about gender, class, race/ethnicity in most of my classes here. Gender is a binary variable at best, and female data isn’t even included in many analyses. I have a friend who was discouraged by one of our professors in writing her term paper with a gender focus because apparently these studies don’t get published. wtf?!?! It’s sad really. And disappointing. This isn’t true for all of my classes, there are some exceptions. This semester my classes consist of Research Design, Online Behavioral Experiments, Cross-Sectional Data Analysis and I am also learning QGIS (basically making digital maps) for my student job. It’s a completely new world for me. Anyway, ever since I started this program a year ago, I have not had a real break. There is always some uni responsibility I can worry about. And I’m so tired. I feel overworked and in desperate need of a real vacation. I usually have my summers to reset and I didn’t really get that chance this summer. It was so hard to finish my final paper from last semester while already having a new job and starting the new semester. But the driving force behind my demotivation isn’t just a lot of work. I’ve worked a lot before, it’s definitely not something I’m incapable of. But I need a purpose, I need to know why I’m doing what I’m doing and I need to believe in it and want it. That’s just how my brain works, I need internal motivation. I want to explain why this is currently creating a problem.

How do we learn as a society? What is our system for this? Science, right? Well, science isn’t as innocent as it seems to be in my opinion. So our scientists have the responsibility of producing knowledge and then we disseminate this knowledge into the world to make learning a collective activity. But there are soo many problems in this system. I’m speaking more about social scientists since that is my background, I can’t say much about other things but I have a feeling that some of my thoughts are generalizable. Producing knowledge in sociology works like this: You have to write articles that ideally will be published in journals where people can read them. In order to become someone who can actually write a publishable article you have to go through years of education where your labor isn’t even properly recognized because you don’t even really make money but live off either other income or scholarships, maintaining a poor student status for a very long time. Writing a paper, you can’t say anything without proving it, there is no room for normativity or describing what should be which cuts off ideas of change. You have to have read everything about a topic before having the right to an opinion (which gets harder and harder as time passes since there is more and more to know). You basically have to completely detach yourself from your paper, as if the person behind a paper or an idea has no effect on it. Subjectivities are ignored for some reason but that doesn’t make them non-existent. Even using the word “I” is discouraged. You’re alienated from the knowledge you yourself produced. You write a paper and it takes years to go through the publishing process sometimes decreasing the relevance of your paper or just making it outdated by the time it's published. Even if you do publish it you get no money for your work and sometimes you even have to pay to publish it. How is it that the main product of our work has no monetary value for us, the producer? What does that say about how much value we attribute to knowledge in a society where everything’s value is determined by a price? You would think then that this knowledge would be accessible, right? Well, guess what? It’s not. The journals get all the money and they create a huge barrier for the accessibility of these articles. No one actually pays money to read an academic journal and despite this, they’re pretty fucking expensive. Schools and libraries buy very expensive access to them for their students. So the only people reading these are students in the discipline and other academics. This knowledge is actually not disseminated at all, perhaps creating the “ivory tower” of academia. And people argue that our responsibility as a sociologist is to write objective articles and it's up to policy people to read them and use them in policy decisions. That’s bullshit, I highly doubt that policymakers go through all sociology journals and try to learn and understand what kind of policies would have better social outcomes and then actually implement them. So why are we doing this? How does it make sense?

I’m a person that wanted to change something in the world and I dedicated myself to sociology for that, I know others share this purpose as well. But all I’m doing is focusing on the things I’m allowed to study and working my ass off for things that I’m not sure I really agree with. This takes so much of my time, I never get around to all my ideas that I believe can actually make a difference. I feel that I’m being distracted. Academia has become such a thing that you can spend your life working your ass off and have no impact on the world at all in practice. If you keep people with revolutionary ideas busy enough, they’ll never get around to the revolution, right? If you don’t even let them discuss their ideas freely, how can these ideas grow? How can I change anything if I’m only allowed to talk about what currently is? I’m sick of all these limitations and restrictions, and I’m not only tired I’m becoming angry with it too. What a smart and sneaky way to pacify intellectual minds that actually give a shit. We give years and years to get our stupid titles and end up changing nothing. Even if journals were free and accessible, no one would read them because as scientists we’ve practically created new languages with complex terminology that an ordinary person can’t understand anymore so why bother? Plus, people don’t even read books anymore, no one will read a journal article full of sociological terminology and boring empirical analyses that they barely understand. We’re making it harder and harder to achieve collective learning. Making sociology more scientific is a dangerous endeavor. It’s making it irrelevant. I refuse to be a part of it. I want to create knowledge that can be transferred to the masses. We need to learn together. We should be making the knowledge we produce more consumable, understandable. Go ahead, write your scientific article. But also have a project to explain the main points as a documentary for example. Or have a short, lay-person version available. You don’t even have to do it yourself, you can collaborate with artists or basically anyone capable of helping you and make a project out of it. You would probably even earn more for this kind of an approach.

Well, Sociology isn’t like this in all universities, not my home university at least. But then how do these two approaches relate to each other? Qualitative and anthropological studies are looked down upon here, where analytical sociology is the dominant approach. The sociology I know is shoved under the labels of “cultural studies” and “ethnography” and “humanities” and delegitimized because of its normativity and lack of scientific method. There is no room for normativity, subjectivity, emotions, opinions or art in science. Well sorry to burst your bubble but “science” wasn’t even invented to study the social world so directly copying a method that’s not even meant for your object of study doesn’t seem so smart either. Now let’s look at excerpts from a very interesting article to illustrate further how this is a problem.

Ever since I started this masters program that takes an “analytical” approach to sociology and prioritizes quantitative analyses in the name of a more “sound” scientific method, I have begun to think about the concept of objectivity because something didn’t feel right in what I was expected to learn and internalize as a sociologist. I couldn’t really understand what it was, but the unintended consequences this approach produced really bothered me. Paying less attention to theory was one downside but then I realized that data is everything in this approach so you kind of have to study what you have data on. This means the widespread exclusion of any gender identity other than male and female, and apparently, even female data is also not used because it is easier to do the analysis without it. Apparently men and women are so different from each other that if you include both in the analysis then you can’t isolate your treatment effects. Quantitative analysis means you don’t actually know any of the people you are talking about. They are pure numbers. It means that if you can’t translate a concept into a number, you can’t discuss that topic. It also means that asking “why” and “how” questions becomes pretty difficult. It means making many assumptions you hide behind your claims of objectivity. And for some reason, I just felt that this approach is a masculine approach to science. It just didn’t feel right and luckily, because I couldn’t explain myself to those around me, I tried to find a feminist critique of scientific objectivity and I was successful! Elizabeth Fee explains it all so well, I want to reflect on some of her ideas.

I think we all know by now that we still live in quite a patriarchal world but sometimes I think we don’t understand how deep it actually goes. I didn’t for quite a long time. For example if you say women are disadvantaged in science, I think one would usually think of low female representation in certain scientific jobs or unequal pay. But that’s just the surface in my opinion. Fee argues that the underlying patriarchal power dynamics characterized by inequality and oppression are masked by some notions of “scientific objectivity” and that we must reexamine the role this concept plays in society. She explains subjectivity and objectivity really well in one paragraph:

“The liberal ideology of science posits man as a rational individual. “Man” is capable of creating a rational knowledge of the world through a process of testing and discarding hypotheses. The techniques of a scientific discipline, such as controlled experimentation, the use of specific quantitative and statistical techniques, the replication of findings, and the submission of results to the collective criticism of the scientific community, are specifically intended to root out any individual eccentricities, biases, or other sources of error. Subjectivity is regarded with suspicion, as possible contaminant of the process of knowledge production, and one which must be subjected to stringent controls.”

Liberal ideology brings with it the idea of “rational man” as the default human being and Fee argues that the characteristics of this man are actually male characteristics that are contrasted with “emotional women.” The dichotomies go on: rationality and emotionality, objectivity and subjectivity, culture and nature, public and private. So she says in liberal philosophy there are two binary categories of existence: male and female.

“Science itself is perceived as masculine, not simply because the majority of scientists have historically been men, but also because the characteristics of science are perceived as sex-linked. The objectivity said to be characteristic of the production of scientific knowledge is specifically identified as a male way of relating to the world. Even the hierarchy of the sciences is a hierarchy of masculinity; as the language suggests, the “hard” sciences at the top of the hierarchy are seen as more male than the “soft” sciences at the bottom.”

This made me think of how “objectivity” in terms of science and “objectification” are related to each other. Objectivity is supposed to be a good thing, right? Well, when you think about it objectivity requires to objectify things and as far as I know objectification does not have positive connotations. It requires putting a certain distance between yourself as the scientist and the “object” to be studied. It requires ignoring that subject’s subjectivity. It’s a cold of way of learning in my opinion. Anthropology and qualitative studies, on the other hand, require getting up close to the subject of examination. It requires talking for hours with several people and listening to them and their subjective experiences. You have to listen and ask the right questions, you have to observe everything and empathize and try your best to understand. It requires getting to know them almost personally. The stories that my interviewees have told me! I probably know a lot about them that even their close ones don’t. And when you are close to your subjects of study, you feel for them and you care about them and you care about the consequences of the story you tell in their name. You have a responsibility to that person. It’s a warm way of learning, perhaps a feminine way of knowing the world. You don’t care about numbers that are in some way attached to some people you have never actually seen before.

And how would we define this kind of objective scientific approach? This masculine scientific approach has been criticised for being “analytic, mechanistic, controlling, exploitive, and ultimately destructive.” It is a science that holds the goal of exploiting the whole world for white men. It’s the same science that justifies the rape of the world by these men. Controlling and abusing the natural and social world to their own advantage. The same science that brought us to today. Science backed up the idea of eugenics and fueled the holocaust and other disgusting crimes against humanity. Science created the ridiculous working conditions we are subject to today. Science justified the subordination of all people to white men. “Russell Means, a major figure in the American Indian Movement, has denounced all forms of “European” thought as devoid of spiritual appreciation of the natural world, and as therefore leading merely to different forms of exploitation of the earth and natural resources.”

Fee writes that according to feminist psychologists, the male psyche of the western capitalist world is just plain “unable to integrate self-creative activity with a primary concern for others,” leaving the responsibility of care and emotional expression and forming and maintaining healthy relationships to women. Basically, we have to think about the social consequences of masculine action because men don’t. “This contributes to men’s inability to organize technology for human ends… Scientific culture which is responsive to human needs depends on the recovery of that part of human experience which has been relegated to the female.”

Today, you see women everywhere trying to prove themselves in this patriarchal system. How do they do it? They very often try to be more “manly,” more masculine. They try to enter male-dominated fields, they try to adopt the masculine ways of doing things. Me too, all my life I felt that I had to prove that I can do anything a boy can. Now I think fuck that. Maybe boys should try to be more like me, I can do it better than them. Instead of making women the problem and trying to integrate them into the system they are not well represented in, maybe we should change our perspective and recognize that the system is a problem and women do not have to fit into it.

“The radical feminist critique of science and technology locates the problems not in women, but in the particular character of our production of scientific knowledge. The problem is not one of making women more scientific, but of making science less masculine. When masculinity is seen as an incomplete and thus distorted form of humanity, the issue of making science and technology less masculine is also the issue of making it more completely human.”

Fee also explains how the scientific method is not completely evil and it has very useful aspects so we shouldn’t think of it as black and white, but a grey area with room for improvement:

“Because science has been presented as an objective force above and beyond society, it may appear that the claim of science to be the arbitrator of truth must be accepted or rejected wholesale. If rejected, we seem to be left without mutually agreed criteria of validity. Decisions between different theories (for example, evolution vs. creationism, or feminist vs. sexist interpretations of social arrangements) would be quite simply a matter of political power. We need not, however, go so far as to reject the whole human effort to comprehend the world in rational terms, nor the idea that forms of knowledge can be subjected to critical evaluation and empirical testing. The concept of creating knowledge through a constant process of practical interactions with nature, the willingness to consider all assumptions and methods as open to question, the expectation that ideas will be tested and refined in practice, and that results and conclusions of research will be subjected to the most unfettered critical evaluation-all these are aspects of scientific objectivity which should be preserved and defended. The hope of learning more about the world and ourselves by such a collective process is not one to be abandoned. The ideal of individual creativity subjected to the constraints of community validation through a set of recognized procedures preserves the promise of progress.”

So what are the problematic consequences of this system that we should specifically focus on? I’ll provide you with her categorization and explanation and I will add a reflection with an example in the paragraphs following the explanations.

*Production of knowledge/social uses. *The idea of objectivity can be used to create a distance between the production of pure science, as seen as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an abstract and value-free ideal, involving purely intellectual and technical decisions-and the uses of sciences, seen as involving purely political and economic considerations. If the production of knowledge is isolated from the uses to which that knowledge is put, then the scientist is freed from any social or moral responsibility. Even the scientist who accepts funding from military sources is therefore free to insist that the use of “his” research is outside of “his” control, and not part of “his” responsibility; the researcher in a corporate laboratory is free to consider “his” work as purely objective and unfettered by any economic considerations.

This is kinda like what I mentioned above where it’s our job to just produce knowledge and leave it to others to decide what to do with it. I think this distinction alienates us from the big picture and also distances us from the concept of “responsibility” like Fee says above. In one of my classes last semester we read an article about how having high-performance employees in an organization and increasing contact between them and the other employees, increases overall productivity within the organization. I found this to be deeply disturbing. My kind of sociology would question why we’re trying to trick people into working more with subtle psychological tactics. It reminded me of one of my own work experiences. I was working at a boutique consultancy company that had very few employees and even fewer that were legally working there and being compensated “fairly” (I mean it was legal but my boss told me herself that she didn’t pay them sufficient money). And you know what, the two people she had hired formally, they were two of the most extreme over-achievers I have ever met. Their contributions and effort were honestly pretty impressive, they basically devoted their lives to the company and they did a great job too. The thing is, those were the standards that I (as a homeless, severely underpaid, full-time intern) were held to. I was expected to integrate into the “culture” of this company. Except the thing was, I had no money and no home. Working everyday and sometimes overtime and on weekends left me with very little time to actually earn money which I did through ghost-writing. But in Turkey even that doesn’t pay well but I needed every bit. Plus I was always staying at a friend’s place. Do you realize how overwhelming and stressful a situation that is? My coworkers didn’t and I was politely made to believe that I wasn’t good enough for the company and lacked motivation and I was basically kicked out when I asked for a decent wage. Well, I’ve been checking out what the company is doing these days and I also asked my boss how she wanted to grow the company and she basically said it would stay just about the same as it was then. So she has two full-time legal employees that work their asses off and then she hires underpaid interns and squeezes work out of them by exposing them to extremely high performers and once they wake up she finds new ones. Maybe she isn’t doing it intentionally but it just works out that way because it’s cheap labor which is an efficient way to create profit. I don’t want to think that she actually did read it somewhere and is cruel enough to actively execute it as a business strategy. I honestly don’t know. But I hope you can see where I’m going with this. There are people or companies in the world who will exploit this knowledge given the chance so someone has to take responsibility for it.

*Thinking/feeling. *The claim of “objectivity” may be taken as requiring a divorce between scientific rationality and any emotional or social commitment. Thinking is supposedly divorced from feeling, and feeling is said to be outside the realm of objectivity. Indeed, the concept of scientific objectivity may be used to devalue any positons expressed with emotional intensity or conviction; feeling becomes inherently suspicious, the mark of an inferior form of consciousness. Once this hierarchy between thinking and feeling has become internalized, it is axiomatic that those who identify with “thought” can justify their dominance over those identified with “feeling.” Women are very used to the separation between thought and feeling and the ways in which it can be used to reproduce relations of dominance and subordination between the sexes; it is a familiar aspect of intimate relationships. If a man can present his position in an argument as the point of view of rationality and define the woman’s position as an emotional one, then we know that she has already lost the struggle to be heard; he has already won.

I mean, WOW! This excerpt is just very self-explanatory and such a good formulation of a feeling that I believe a lot of people probably experienced. Why is rationality more valid than emotionality? Why? Why the fuck are we so terrified of emotions and have so much trouble trusting them? I can relate to her example from my own relationships. I have very often been made to feel that my emotions were non-valid because they were emotions. I would just be told that it’s not logical for me to feel whatever way I was feeling and I think I was never able to explain that that is precisely what emotions are and they don’t go away when you tell them they’re not logical. Human emotion is a huuuge part of our existence, everyone has emotions. Why do we ignore them? repress them? delegitimize them? And I’ve also been told that my writing is too emotional. I took it as a compliment, I refuse to be shamed because of my completely natural emotions and I won’t hide them just for the convenience of others. This is kinda like what qualitative science is compared to quantitative science, it is ignored precisely because it is more human and emotional.

*Expert/nonexpert. *This dichotomy reproduces a similar power relationship on a social scale. Everyone lacking scientific credentials can be made to feel uninformed, unintelligent, and lacking in the skills required for successful debate over matters of public policy. Those with sufficient wealth can afford to hire the scientific expertise needed to give their positions public validation; those without wealth are made to feel that they must bow to the superior knowledge of the experts. Knowledge can, in this system, flow in only one direction, from expert to nonexpert. There is no dialogue; the voice of the scientific authority is like the male voiceover in commercials, a disembodied knowledge which cannot be questioned, whose author is inaccessible.

Wow, this one is a powerful point as well. Knowledge is authority, it’s power and only some people have access to it. In practice I don’t actually need the credentials to become a scientist or an expert, learning is possible outside of that system but you will get no recognition for it. This reminds me of how a self-taught astronomer in a village in the East of Turkey found a star or something and informed NASA and I think he didn’t actually even get the credit for it. Perhaps being self-taught is even better?… So, if you consider that men are always advantaged in life and careers, they have more power over the knowledge being created. I mean, birth control is the perfect example for this, isn’t it? If men are creating the knowledge surrounding the topic, the solutions will be convenient for men with no regard to how it is for women. We have normalized taking dangerous pills that fuck up your hormones and mental health while men have to do nothing and are free from any responsibility. Do you think that this would be the case if women had a say in it? And not being able to question “experts” because of their credentials? How is that a good idea? We don’t trust subjectivity but we forget that subjectivity is everywhere, including science. The scientist is a person and people have subjectivities and they do affect your actions and your work and also the knowledge that you produce. So why can’t we question that kind of subjectivity?

*Subject/object. *This relationship is again one of domination; the knowing mind is active, the object of knowledge passive. This attitude toward nature has been immensely productive in allowing the manipulation and transformation of natural processes to serve human ends. Women, who have already been defined as natural objects in relation to man, and who have traditionally been viewed as passive, have special reason to question the political power relation expressed in this epistemological distancing. The subject/object split legitimizes the logic of domination of nature; it can also legitimize the logic of domination of man by man, and woman by man. Just as the ecological crisis requires that we see “man” as part of nature and not as a superior being above and beyond natural processes, so too the task of human liberation requires us to see science as a part of human society, determined by particular aims and values, and not as the depersonalized voice of abstract authority. Rejecting the efforts made (in the name of scientific objectivity) to deny the social content of scientific knowledge will enable us to concretely debate the values and intentions of scientific practice.

Honestly, she doesn’t leave much to be said. The next part of this post is all her. I couldn’t phrase it better anyway so I just left it the way it is. She explains how “science” is not some abstract thing that is separate from the rest of the world and the socio-economic systems that structure it. They are very much embedded in and a part of those systems, and should be acknowledged as such.

This raises another set of problems with the theme of scientific objectivity, the question of the social position of scientists. Those scientists who choose to become actively involved in questioning the social uses of science or the power relations which determine its direction, risk being seen as no longer “objective.” Here, the notion of “objectivity” merely a code word for the political passivity of those scientists who have tacitly agreed to accept a privileged social position and freedom of inquiry within the laboratory in return for their political silence. We are told that the production of scientific knowledge must be independent of politically motivated interference or direction. Yet we see scientists testifying before congressional committees, we find scientists in law courts, we find scientists involved in disputes at every level of public policy, and it is obvious that the experts take sides. It is also obvious that these “experts” are very often funded by corporate interests and that there are few penalties for those who find that their research supports the positions of these powerful lobbies.

We may still treasure the mythology of the individual scientist, alone in “his” laboratory and isolated from mere daily concerns, wrestling with fundamental problems of the physical universe. In reality, the scientist today is a salaried worker, part of an institutional hierarchy-perhaps a small cog in a corporate research team-working on some small aspect of a problem which has probably been formulated by others. Her or his survival depends in a very concrete way on the structure of funding decisions made far from the laboratory; she or he is usually dependent on economic and political decisions beyond her or his control or influence. In what way is the average scientific worker independent of the larger political process, and how can we say that science as a whole is autonomous of social organization?

A moment’s reflection shows us that the production of scientific knowledge is highly structured and organized, and is closely integrated with structures of political and economic power. It is naive to present the idea of scientific objectivity as though science itself were above or beyond politics. The assertion of objectivity is, however, used to mask the actual conditions of scientific work. Any society will attempt to generate the kinds of scientific knowledge which best fulfill its social, economic and political needs. Determines the kinds of questions which can be posed, and the tools available for answering them.What we know as modern science developed only with the capitalist mode of production and its new kind of practical activities and economic needs.

To understand the social position of scientists, then, we must study social organization and its production at various levels. At one level, the identity of the scientist is a secondary question, not because he or she is above politics, but because scientists must fit into an existing political reality. The funding and organization of science follows social priorities as established by existing relations of power. At another level, we must recognize that scientists have a certain autonomy within these structures, and therefore have a special responsibility to examine the ways in which particular forms of research may help or hinder the goal of human liberation.

If we are to move in the direction of a more fully human understanding of science, we should resist rigid separations between the production and uses of knowledge, subject and object, thinking and feeling, expert and nonexpert. This requires readmitting the human subject into the production of scientific knowledge, accepting science as a historically determined human activity, and not as an abstract autonomous force. If we admit that scientific activity is not neutral, but responds to specific social agenda and needs, then we can in turn begin to see how science, and scientists, might relate in a different way to social, including feminist, questions.

Historical investigations of the ”woman problem” have considered women as natural objects and as passive in relation to the creation of knowledge; at this stage, we can only imagine what it might mean to be the active subjects in the creation of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. At this point, while it is necessary to argue the case for the entrance of women into the scientific professions as presently constituted, it is also important to push the epistemological critique of science to the point where we can begin to construct a clear vision of alternate ways of creating knowledge. The feminist critique should be used as a tool for seeing what it might mean in practice to liberate science from the inherited habits of thought resulting from the previous separation of human experience into mutually contradictory realms. Overcoming the dualisms that feminists have identified as being associated with sexual dichotomies may offer the prospect of a radically transformed science, one that is as yet only faintly visible as a possibility for the future.

Finally I want to share with you an email I wrote to my teacher that was my reflection of a talk he had recommended and that describes why quantitative methods do not fit perfectly to social sciences and why we should be cautious about this.

The talk brought up a lot of questions and I want to summarize it for you before I pose them. From what I understand Lily critiques the applicability of the interventionist concept of causation in the social world. She claims that the categories that we’re interested in, whose effects that we are trying to measure (race, gender, class etc.) have an irresolvable normative element which makes it impossible to understand what is constitutive of the concept/category and to separate that from the context. The example she provided to illustrate this idea was to compare an audit study with a botanical experiment where the treatment is a fertilizer. So in the latter, you can talk about causal effects of a fertilizer because you really can isolate its effect and control for everything else and the effect you are studying is caused by the molecular composition of that fertilizer which is an inherent quality. Whereas in an audit study the treatment is race for example and race is not an inherent quality of a person, it’s a relational concept that is in essence a certain positioning in social structure that results in advantages or disadvantages. So “race” only exists when there are multiple people of different races, it is not an inherent quality. It only means something socially, not individually. So you can’t study it the same way you would a fertilizer.

Another illuminating example: in a gender audit study you match on CVs but not on clothing, why? Where do we decide to stop matching? People of different genders wearing the same clothing (or even just them being confident) can create different responses. So the method makes it hard to measure what we want to measure. The complexity of the social world leads us to make abstractions which involve the prioritization of certain things based on research aims or normative backgrounds: what is too complicated to factor in and what is essential? What assumptions are necessary evils and which are unacceptable? She says this is especially problematic because legal issues are informed by studies of causal effects of race that are based on social scientists’ experiments in which they claim impartiality in order to gain legitimacy but she thinks that they are not impartial. She argues that quantitative research should show more reflexivity, which is something I’ve learned is very important in qualitative analysis for example.

I would be interested in hearing what you think of this, I hope I was able to convey her arguments in an understandable way because, honestly, I can’t say that I understand it 100%. She and another participant also said that this could be a problem of misspecifying the unit of observation: the person being racialized vs. their surroundings (people who racialize). But operationalizing this is difficult as far as I understand. This took me back to our discussion on networks and I was wondering if the practicality of network analysis in social sciences is because of this? But then, can you establish causality in network analysis? Or was it the whole point of the talk that we shouldn’t be trying to establish causality? Someone asked if there are other modes of causation that we can conceptualize: structural, linear, layered, transitive or set-theoretical. I have never heard of these before but this also seems like an interesting question.

Ok, now I’m done :) Here’s a link to the article: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/archives/scientific-objectivity-feminism/