Fab Feb - Facts and Feelings
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| Image by Anemone123 on Pixabay |
✅Fitness - #28bysamwood 'Blades of Glory'
✅Free of Alcohol
✅Faculty of Human Sciences event
✅Faculty of Human Sciences event
✅Free lunch
At university today I attended an annual Faculty of Human Sciences event titled ‘Key Thinkers Key Concepts’ (followed by a free lunch). This year’s focus was ‘The Researcher and the Researched: Listening to researched voices in human sciences research’.
Four researchers presented their ideas regarding listening to voices of those being researched. I loved the heart they all had for the people at the centre of their research. These are my interpretations of the messages that were key to me.
1. Liz Pellicano advocates for autistic people to be co-researchers and for the research itself to be more practical for the daily lives of the subjects of the research. Researchers that focus on particular groups of people come from some sense of a ‘normal’ position, thereby ‘othering’ the people they research. Due to the onus of establishing causal relationships, a scientific, factual approach is the norm in research, even when it heavily involves the thoughts and feelings of people. Liz pointed out that autistic people are generally more capable of understanding and interpreting the behaviours of other autistic people. An irony is that one of the differences drawn between autistic people and the rest of the population is a lack of empathy but when the tables are turned, neurotypical people actually demonstrate very little empathy for autistic people. We need to move research from treating human subjects as guinea pigs and losing their trust in research, giving so much for so little gain, to research that develops mutual trust.
2. Joe Blythe presented a number of indigenous authors who contribute to linguistic research and thereby change the nature of the research. Too often studies hone in on what the subjects can’t do rather than what they can do.
3. Cathy McMahon researched mothers who conceived via IVF and learnt more from talking with them than “facts from stats”. Drawings by the mothers of successfully implanted embryos showed the depth of feelings involved in the process, something statistics could not reveal. She also believes in multi-disciplinary collaborative research to include a range of perspectives and voices. In a few days I will be having my first meeting with my supervisor for my PhD. I have scoped out a research proposal that involves a range of people in enterprise education in Australian secondary schools (senior school leadership, teachers and students, perhaps parents too), mainly about what each of them value in enterprise education. I think multiple perspectives are important too.
4. More controversially, Tobia Fattore presented a position that children in research should be treated with similar ethical approaches as adults so they can be more active participants in research instead of adults speaking and/or signing on their behalf and taking away their agency. They should be positioned in the research according to situation rather than having blanket rules that err on the side of excluding their involvement. I liked the idea that in addition to looking for possible harm that could be caused from the research to children, that ethics committees should also be looking at the harm or even the reduction of agency and power that occurs when children’s voices are excluded from the research.
Facts are important. Research needs to have an element of certainty if it is to inform the future. But feelings are important too. As I struggle with my understanding of academic theory and the concept of reality, particularly in relation to ontology, epistemology, axiology and more, I am increasingly convinced there is a reality that occurs, what happens in the world, but interpretation of that reality is subject to people’s perspectives and their own experiences of that reality. Each person’s interpretation of reality is valid but there is always a core truth of what happens. It is the why of the reality that is more interesting.
Enough of the deep and heavy for now. I hope to revisit this in a future post and I hope my thinking on the topic has become clearer in the meantime.
At university today I attended an annual Faculty of Human Sciences event titled ‘Key Thinkers Key Concepts’ (followed by a free lunch). This year’s focus was ‘The Researcher and the Researched: Listening to researched voices in human sciences research’.
Four researchers presented their ideas regarding listening to voices of those being researched. I loved the heart they all had for the people at the centre of their research. These are my interpretations of the messages that were key to me.
1. Liz Pellicano advocates for autistic people to be co-researchers and for the research itself to be more practical for the daily lives of the subjects of the research. Researchers that focus on particular groups of people come from some sense of a ‘normal’ position, thereby ‘othering’ the people they research. Due to the onus of establishing causal relationships, a scientific, factual approach is the norm in research, even when it heavily involves the thoughts and feelings of people. Liz pointed out that autistic people are generally more capable of understanding and interpreting the behaviours of other autistic people. An irony is that one of the differences drawn between autistic people and the rest of the population is a lack of empathy but when the tables are turned, neurotypical people actually demonstrate very little empathy for autistic people. We need to move research from treating human subjects as guinea pigs and losing their trust in research, giving so much for so little gain, to research that develops mutual trust.
2. Joe Blythe presented a number of indigenous authors who contribute to linguistic research and thereby change the nature of the research. Too often studies hone in on what the subjects can’t do rather than what they can do.
3. Cathy McMahon researched mothers who conceived via IVF and learnt more from talking with them than “facts from stats”. Drawings by the mothers of successfully implanted embryos showed the depth of feelings involved in the process, something statistics could not reveal. She also believes in multi-disciplinary collaborative research to include a range of perspectives and voices. In a few days I will be having my first meeting with my supervisor for my PhD. I have scoped out a research proposal that involves a range of people in enterprise education in Australian secondary schools (senior school leadership, teachers and students, perhaps parents too), mainly about what each of them value in enterprise education. I think multiple perspectives are important too.
4. More controversially, Tobia Fattore presented a position that children in research should be treated with similar ethical approaches as adults so they can be more active participants in research instead of adults speaking and/or signing on their behalf and taking away their agency. They should be positioned in the research according to situation rather than having blanket rules that err on the side of excluding their involvement. I liked the idea that in addition to looking for possible harm that could be caused from the research to children, that ethics committees should also be looking at the harm or even the reduction of agency and power that occurs when children’s voices are excluded from the research.
Facts are important. Research needs to have an element of certainty if it is to inform the future. But feelings are important too. As I struggle with my understanding of academic theory and the concept of reality, particularly in relation to ontology, epistemology, axiology and more, I am increasingly convinced there is a reality that occurs, what happens in the world, but interpretation of that reality is subject to people’s perspectives and their own experiences of that reality. Each person’s interpretation of reality is valid but there is always a core truth of what happens. It is the why of the reality that is more interesting.
Enough of the deep and heavy for now. I hope to revisit this in a future post and I hope my thinking on the topic has become clearer in the meantime.
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