SSH 301 Lecture 2: SSH 301 Week 2
17 Jul 2016
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Document Summary
Researchers are people, do not exist outside of the social worlds and web of social relations they attempt to explain. Researchers bring their social locations, values, assumptions, beliefs to the research. Research involves making decisions; these decisions are not neutral. Another area that illustrates the political nature of research is the institutional infrastructure related to it. Indigenous peoples have experienced unrelenting research of a profoundly exploitative nature. Research has been complicit in colonization, racialization, othering, dehumanizing, marginalization. Essentializing and freezing indigenous peoples in the past. Denying indigenous peoples agency as researchers and knowledge holders. Biomedical experimentation; children on residential schools used for tests. Where research has gone wrong: indigenous peoples have not been consulted, data gathered without consent. One way to conduct social scientific inquiry is through deduction. Using deduction, one begins with a theory or explanation for something, then goes out into the world and tests it: theory to observations/findings.
