There is no omniscient disembodied knower. The position we look from, the tools we look with & the concepts we use to understand information all shape what we see. Thinking that ‘what I see’ is ‘the truth’ is the blinkered ignorance that comes with privilege.
Acknowledge your assumptions & be transparent about your methods & then I may trust you. Pretend you’re unbiased & objective? No way.
We’re all #SituatedActors, folks. Our situations & intersts shape what we see. People trained in ‘hard’ sciences are acculturated to disregard this & too much work in these areas is impoverished by it. The tools & methods used in #SocialSciences can enrich our understandings in many ways.
Case study: how history can help us make better decisions about effective responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
https://aeon.co/essays/science-and-history-cannot-afford-to-be-indifferent-to-each-other
Congratulations! Your book was the catalyst for #neurodivergent sociologist me, that made it all fall into place. I am forever grateful. (For my parter who is not an autistic obsessive whose special interest is how people make sense of their lives & how diagnoses constructed by #SituatedActors operate as explanatory stories within hierarchies of power, the book that 💡 him was ‘Growing Into Autism’ by Sandra Thom Jones.)
🙏 for your work. @actuallyautistic
This is fascinating.
I’d suggest the conceptual flaw running through all sides of this argument is a misunderstanding of #StandpointTheory. This is the simple but radical idea that we are all #SituatedActors, embodied in place & culture: where we look from, the tools we use to look with & the concepts we use to frame our perceptions determine what we see……
quackademic
