From: "ANITA BROWN" <ABROWN@hestia.fcs.uga.edu>
Organization:  Family & Consumer Sciences
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
Date:          Tue, 8 Oct 1996 09:01:57 EST5EDT
Subject:       Re: Research
Priority: normal
Message-ID: <709AD26C31@hestia.fcs.uga.edu>
Denys, I'm too much in the middle of this same quagmire myself to 
offer much more than sympathy... However, I recommend an article by 
Kate Lenzo in Educational Researcher -- where she describes this 
very problem that you have named and provides an example of how it 
was managed in a feminist poststructural doctoral dissertation.

The reference is:

Lenzo, K. (1995). Validity and self-reflexivity meet 
poststructuralism: Scientific ethos and the transgressive self. 
Educational Research, ??, 17- 45.  [i don't have the volume number, 
but it is the May issue]

Thanks for bringing up this issue  -- I look forward to hearing 
related posts.

Good Luck, 

Anita Brown


> 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
> 
> 
> 
>