Negotiations of objectivity in the social sciences

In our ""CCA" module, we discussed the nuances in our understandings of objectivity in the social sciences.

Delineating the break from the natural sciences, understandings of objectivity in the social sciences are constituted in the values of the researcher, her/his constructions of the self, her/his relationship with the subjectivity of the research participants, and her/his negotiations with materiality.

That there are material contexts of symbolic behavior is a key point in culturally-centered work, and yet this material context is negotiated symbolically, through language and through acts of representation. In this sense, communication lies at the heart of the social sciences, the world of the material being negotiated through meaning making.

We come to understand materiality through the symbolically mediatized narrativization of the material world.

For example, the everyday lived experience of struggling with hunger is a material reality that is felt in the absence of food.

Yet, our understanding of this materiality is constituted in the symbolic exchange between the researcher and the participant, in the sharing of stories of hunger, and in the mutually constituted process of meaning making. We make sense of the world through our own subjectivities, interacting with subjectivities of our research participants, and together attributing meaning to the material world around us.

In sum, materiality is important to our understanding of human experiences. How hunger then comes to be understood through everyday lived struggles with the absence of food is felt physically/physiologically by the body in the form of pain. How we make sense of this material reality relates to the symbolic meanings we co-construct and the ways in which we chart out courses of action.

The whiteness of binaries that erase the Global South: On Communicative Inversions and the invitation to Vijay Prashad in Aotearoa

When I learned through my activist networks that the public intellectual Vijay Prashad was coming to Aotearoa, I was filled with joy. In my early years in the U.S., when learning the basics of the struggle against the fascist forces of Hindutva, I came in conversation with Vijay's work. Two of his critical interventions, the book, The Karma of Brown Folk , and the journal article " The protean forms of Yankee Hindutva " co-authored with Biju Matthew and published in Ethnic and Racial Studies shaped my early activism. These pieces of work are core readings in understanding the workings of Hindutva fascism and how it mobilizes cultural tropes to serve fascist agendas. Much later, I felt overjoyed learning about his West Bengal roots and his actual commitment to the politics of the Left, reflected in the organising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a political register that shaped much of my earliest lessons around Global South resistance, collectivization, and orga...

Zionist hate mongering, the race/terror trope, and the Free Speech Union: Part 1

March 15, 2019. It was a day of terror. Unleashed by a white supremacist far-right terrorist. Driven by hate for brown people. Driven by Islamophobic hate. Earlier in the day, I had come across a hate-based hit piece targeting me, alongside other academics, the University of Auckland academic Professor Nicholas Rowe , Professor Richard Jackson at Otago University, Professor Kevin P Clements at Otago University, Dr. Rose Martin from University of Auckland and Dr. Nigel Parsons at Massey University. Titled, "More extremists in New Zealand Universities," the article threw in the labels "terror sympathisers" and "extremist views." Written by one David Cumin and hosted on the website of the Israel Institute of New Zealand, the article sought to create outrage that academics critical of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid are actually employed by universities in New Zealand. Figure 1: The web post written by David Cumin on the site of Israel Institute ...

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...

Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

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