The spirit of the social sciences: Speaking truth to power

The social sciences offer insights into social, cultural, political, economic phenomena through empirically-driven work.

The quest for empiricism essentially means that the social scientist has to pay close attention to data in drawing her conclusions. Good social science is not simply about running an equation or generating a simulation on the basis of assumptions, but actually putting these observations and assumptions to test.

For instance, mathematically drawing out how two players may make specific choices in a game based on a rational actor model is perhaps irrelevant unless tested through empirical observations.

The observation of social phenomena thus is grounded in a commitment to generating truth claims, however contingent and incomplete.

It is possible that some or many of these truth claims that emerge from honest social science scholarship disagree with the broader assumptions or foregone conclusions of the dominant power structures in a given social-political-economic system.

For instance, when a social scientist observes the poor health effects of large-scale inequalities in systems, the conclusions drawn may not really be palatable to the political-economic plutocrats that govern many universities today.

Yet, the commitment of good social science lies in speaking these very truths, drawn from close study of data.

Speaking truth to power in this sense is quintessential to the integrity of social science.

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...

The difficult conversation we need now: Anti-Māori racism in the upper-caste, upwardly mobile Indian community

The difficult conversation we need now: Anti-Māori racism in the upper-caste, upwardly mobile Indian community The same Indian community organisations that mobilised quickly around a haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition have been almost entirely silent on the sustained anti-Māori political project advanced by ACT MP Parmjeet Parmar. Mohan Dutta argues that this asymmetry is not accidental — it is what the model minority script trains us to perform, and it is time for our community to have a much harder conversation. There is a particular asymmetry in how anti-racism is being performed in Aotearoa right now, and the haka–apology cycle around Che Wilson and Parmjeet Parmar throws it into sharp relief. The same Indian community organisations, lobby groups, and outlets that have mobilised quickly and articulately around the haka performed at the Tainui regional kapa haka competition — securing an emailed apology from Wilson, a follow-up apology from Te Pae K...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Search This Blog