#reflexivity

Pierre Bourdieu, Risposte. Per un'antropologia riflessiva, Foreword and Introduction by Loïc J. D. Wacquant, Translation by Daniela Orati, Cover design by Pierluigi Cerri, «Saggi», Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 1992

Okay, here's something to be aware of because I'm seeing more and more of this in research papers. It's kind of like a woke ritual meditation about their intersectional positionality and how they approach the data.

These aren't methods per se, even though they're usually within the methods section, but really they're just emotional statements that are reflecting on their privilege that they believe somehow helps them mitigate their bias when they're analyzing the data for their paper.

It's really awkward and strange. Let me show you.

In this paper, this subsection of the methods is called "Reflexivity and Rigor." They claim that one of the authors' "experience as a Black, gender-fluid, queer clinician and academic with expertise in crisis safety planning, informed the research questions and interview guide," whereas the second and third authors are, quote, "white heterosexual cisgender women."

Now listen to this whole section, okay? I'm going to quote it in full.

"To ensure reflexive analysis, the first and second authors met throughout the analysis and write-up of the study's findings to discuss their assumptions and perspectives of the participant responses, codes, and emerging themes. These ongoing dialogues created intentional spaces to question ideas and examine how each author's social location informed their meaning-making. The authors also shared excerpts from analytic memos created during coding, which captured the first and second authors' emotional reactions to the transcripts and their analytic insights. This collaborative and reflexive process deepened the authors' understanding of the data and helped to manage bias, thus ensuring a thoughtfully interrogated analysis."

This is totally bizarre stuff, and just unthinkable for me, as it really just defeats the entire purpose of a double-blind peer-review process.

Rather than making the authors totally anonymous and unknown to the reviewers so they aren't biasing their reviews on the immutable characteristics of the authors, intimate details about the authors' skin color and sexuality and other things are foregrounded.

What is a soldier without his sword? That he is a poet without his sheet and paper or his tongue, that he is a king without his kingdom. My mother always told me fantastic stories about these lands as if they were worlds of Fantasies, while I tried hard I would fulfill all my dreams, and so it was, when I came of age I moved away from that hut that my parents had, leaving only with a dirty sword and a rusty armor Ready to live those adventures that my mother used to say, that my mother recounted with her sweet voice, storms, suns, droughts, all of that I had to live day after day that passed around this beautiful kingdom One day I just woke up at the dawn of a new day realizing that that fantasy was not treasures or riches, but the experiences one got, one got, the people I met.

That is why the best adventure one can have is not with treasures, but with friends.

(no art used belongs to my property, credit to their respective authors)