Themes
Hierarchies of “Objectivity”
How do efforts at achieving “objectivity”—whether scientific objectivity, ideological neutrality, descriptive nuance, etc.—produce hierarchies among individuals, groups, and perspectives?
Contributors to this section accept that reflexivity and self-critique are important. At the same time, we examine how an insistence on “objectivity” gets used to silence, erase, or invalidate critique, too.
UCL has a racist legacy, but can it move on?
The Guardian, 2 Aug 2020
Andrew Crane: This Guardian article that summarizes recent criticism of UCL for having multiple lecture theatres named after eugenicists. This criticism led to their being renamed. The University’s announcement was a response to the recommendations of an inquiry set up to look at the history of eugenics within the University. The inquiry was prompted when students discovered that the London Conference on Intelligence was being hosted on campus, an invitation-only conference for advancing controversial topics, such as the link between race and intelligence. Speakers at the event included “white supremacists and a researcher who has previously advocated child rape.” The event’s organizer “argued that ‘scientific truths’ about racial difference could not be deemed racist.” This article raises questions about what it means for science to be objective, and how scientific “truths” have been used to justify or naturalize racist ideas. How do the legacies of these ideas persist? Can institutions like universities ever overcome them?
Astrid Braun: Attached is a sticky note that I’ve had on my laptop this quarter (it goes on)—all three of my classes are primarily focused on reading and writing, and the academic texts can be dense. They often include words that I’ve seen before, but never bothered to learn the dictionary definition for; they also often include words I’ve never seen in my life. In some cases, academics concoct new words or compound words in order to be “more precise” in their argument. Or, there are words that I’ve used often, and I know one definition for, but I find that they have other meanings—“meme,” for example. This list (and academic language generally) raises an important question: how do we use words / vocabulary to signal intelligence?
Tech is Social and Cultural, Too
“Despite decades of scholarship on the social fabrication of group identity, tech developers, like their marketing counterparts, are encoding race, ethnicity, and gender as immutable characteristics that can be measured, bought, and sold. Vows of colorblindness are not necessary to shield coded inequality if few believe that scientifically calculated differences are somehow superior to crude human bias.”
Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity 2019, p. 21.
From the Annotator: Language and race are co-naturalized. This means that language gets used to prove the natural-ness of racial difference, and race is used to prove the natural-ness of linguistic difference. The ways we parse and classify language relies on the ways we parse and classify race, and vice versa. And some of these techniques for classifying race, language, etc. come to be seen as more authoritative than others: scientists, experts, policymakers, and other social/cultural elites (like tech developers, marketers, and media producers) lend their authority to efforts at co-constructing hierarchies among languages and races, but they also lend their authority to efforts at co-constructing hierarchies among ways of measuring and judging. (–Josh Babcock)