Objectivity and Diversity

Must Objective Research Be Disinterested?

When minority individuals first begin to enter an institution, whether a classroom, lab, or a research discipline, their initial goal is to secure their place. The institution expects them to assimilate into existing practices and standards. Yet as the numbers of newcomers increase and support for their work arrives from outside the institution (such as through their own publications, community recognition, or changes in legal and political relations), their very presence can begin to transform the institution. Soon, the kinds of questions they ask, the topics they choose to study, their preferred research methods, and the kinds of evidence they find compelling can begin to transform the prevailing standards for good research and for what counts as uncontroversial knowledge.

Such new research directions can appear uninteresting, irrelevant, and not objective enough to their peers. This first exposure to diversity can be unsettling for researchers and scholars who have never experienced these groups of individuals as peers in their educational or work lives, and who have been trained to earlier standards for good research. This has been the case when members of a different gender, class, race, ethnicity, or some other distinctive group seek admission to the mainstream. Moreover, these established researchers' commitments to the objectivity of their research are never only intellectual. They are always also part of how researchers define themselves as morally good persons and their research communities as honorable, as historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argued.

Yet the resistance to diversity perspectives has another source, namely a long-standing conflation of disinterest with reliable or objective research. As historian Robert Proctor points out, both positivists and relativists conflate the contex-tuality of knowledge with the possibility of its reliability. Both confuse the question of whether [Page 1626]sciences might be practiced differently with the problem of objectivity. However, advocacy in itself does not compromise reliability, or, therefore, objectivity. Lots of research is undertaken to advance particular social interests, and yet can produce fully reliable results. Consider, for example, health and medical research, geology, weapons research, and astronomy's mission of improving navigation whether in the “voyages of discovery” or the exploration of space for reasons of nationalism or militarism. Indeed, scientific research is supposed to advance democratic social relations. But whose questions about nature and social relations get to be researched, and how is the governance of science to be held accountable for its actions and consequences? After all, citizen participation and governance accountability are two of the most valued constituents of democratic social relations.

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