Date: Tue, 8 Oct 1996 20:29:11 +1000 (EST)
Message-Id: <2.2.16.19961008200300.1c5fbca8@ozemail.com.au>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: Denys Delany <delany1@ozemail.com.au>
Subject: Research
I am a post-grad student currently engaged in writing a thesis involving
social policy analysis. It appears that those "powerful"  forces to which I
am attached (and subservient) are demanding implicitly, and to a much lesser
degree explicitly, adherence to forms of theorising that will acknowledge
(and perpetuate) the existence of a single, or (at the very least) sets of,
"objectified realities".

My problem is this, the fundamental premise on which my research thesis
rests is the assumption that certainties, as objective truths, have created
dogmatic discourses as "realities", that has resulted in a set of particular
public policies that have missed, become iatrogenic, or have become just
downright brutal and destructive to those who have been subjected to them.
It seems that I am expected to utilise an "accepted" objectified theoretical
framework, as "the" tool of analysis and interpretation, when it is this
that I am actually arguing against.

I suspect that the demands for theoretical "tightness" as empirical, almost
positivist, and therefore "legitimate scientific neutrality", involves more
than a desire for validity and reliability and is primarily political rather
than academic. I believe that these demands for "objective knowledge",
therefore superior truthful or untainted knowledge, are more than just
taking one side of a theoretical divide that has been described as the
pervasive dichotomy between the devil of objectivity and the deep blue sea
of relativism. I am aware that this issue will not be new to most of you
however, I would be very interested to hear form those who are successfully
managing to negotiate their way through it without having to give way to, or
suffer the inherent restrictions of the all powerful, dominant discourses or
the political requirements (agendas) of controlling institutions.

DJ