Committed Objectivity in Race-Class-Gender Research

This article argues that objectivity and commitment are different but that they are articulated rather than being separate issues in social research. This article challenges those who believe that objectivity is impossible or undesirable as well as those who believe that commitment is undesirable in social science. This approach is close to the call by Sandra Harding (1991, 1993) that the methods of science should be applied to science itself by raising the women question in science and the science question in women's studies. Here, she develops her earlier analysis of feminist research agenda in science in terms of empiricism, standpoint epistemology and post-modern feminism. In this paper, a slightly different formulation will be advanced to resolve what could be said to be a false dichotomy between objectivity and commitment. Committed objectivity or objective commitment could be used to capture the inextricability of the articulation of the processes of commitment and objectivity. The article concludes that both objectivity and commitment are necessary elements of good research by all researchers irrespective of (or even because of) race-class-gender differences.     

Methodological issues in feminist research

This paper outlines some of the issues raised for a man contemplating research on women. Many of the issues are serious but they only make such a research more difficult and not impossible. The present male researcher was abie to gain the cooperation of some individual women and the organisations that support women in prison by taking feminist methodological issues seriously in his study of ‘Black Women and the Criminal Justice System’. This paper concludes that feminist research has very useful insights which should be adopted by all researchers whether or not they are feminists especially because such insights often derive from more conventional approaches with which feminist writers do not fully agree.