I woke up this morning thinking about yesterday’s class and the interesting discussion we had around whether it is possible to be objective or not. It’s an absolutely central issue, not just for WGS but for the entire university. For all universities. What are the implications for the knowledge human’s produce if it is possible to be objective versus if it isn’t possible?

Feminist Sandra Harding has raised the issue of what she calls ‘strong objectivity’. She says that traditional ways of producing knowledge have been dominated by particular groups – primarily middle class/elite white men. She argues that while we might think such research is value free/objective, it usually isn’t. She says to get research that is closer to true objectivity we need to start from the experiences of those who haven’t traditionally been involved in knowledge production. Southern scholars such as Chandra Mohanty, Amina Mama and Mahmoud Mamdani, Edward Said (and many many more) have insisted that knowledge generated from both men and women in the South has been marginalised, and that this matters. These ideas are what feed into debates around indigenous knowledge (and why UWC was one of the first (the only one?) to have a school of natural medicine.

In terms of research the key issues revolve around what kind of research questions are objective and which aren’t (who gets to decide? on what basis?), identifying the underlying assumptions behind the questions that shape knowledge production (how, for instance, do we recognise our own biases and assumptions?) How might who we are, our own experiences and embodiment shape what it is we are interested in, the questions we might ask, who we ask them of, and how we interpret what we are told?

What are your thoughts?