Joey Sprague

Self‐Determination and Empowerment: A Feminist Standpoint Analysis of Talk about Disability

In this paper we offer a feminist analysis of talk about self-determination and empowerment in the context of disability, focusing on the case of developmental disabilities. We find strains of the same patterns feminist epistemologists have argued shape the organization of formal knowledge from the standpoint of the privileged. At the extreme, people with developmental disabilities appear as objects without selves, outside of the context of interpersonal and social structural relationships that constrain who they can be by defining them as other, often in multiple and interacting ways. Empowerment, from the dominant standpoint, becomes an abstract attribute or condition; something a person has or does not have. Taking the standpoint of women and other marginalized people offers a view of self-determination as a persons development of his or her self. Empowerment becomes a potential characteristic of a social relationship, one that facilitates the development of someones self. The most empowering relationships are mutual, recognizing and building on the diverse contributions and needs of participants in ways that seek to minimize inequalities over time. The reason some of us are self-determining is that we are in interpersonal and social structural relationships that empower us. To construct interpersonal and social structural relationships that empower people with developmental disabilities requires challenging the way dominant conceptualizations of independence and productivity also express the standpoint of the privileged. The standpoint of women allows all of us to talk more of how we connect with and facilitate one anothers developing selves within communities.

A Feminist Epistemology

The tradition of Western science is built on positivism an epistemology of the fact. For both natural and social science, the world of experience is generally believed to be an objective world, governed by underlying regularities, even natural laws. Facts are empirical observations, outcroppings of these underlying regularities. If, and only if, we systematically and dispassionately observe the data of the empirical world can we detect the patterns of which they are evidence. August Comte had such confidence in the principles of positivism that he believed it was not only possible but also desirable to build a science of society, sociology, upon them. Positivism is the hegemonic epistemology in scientific discourse, so that its specific way of connecting beliefs about knowing with research practices appears seamless: we often fail to see any distinctions among epistemology, methodology, and method. Hardings (1987) distinctions are useful in disaggregating the issues. Epistemology, Harding says, is a theory about knowledge, about who can know what and under what circumstances. A method, Harding notes, is a technique for gathering and analyzing information, for example, forms of listening, watching, or examining records. A methodology is an argument about how these two are linked, that is, about the implications of an epistemology for the practice of research. Every epistemology, Genova (1983) says, involves assumptions about the points of a triad: the knower, the known, and the process of knowing. He describes the history of Western philosophical debates about epistemology as focused on one or another of the

Quality and Quantity: Reconstructing Feminist Methodology.

Many feminist sociologists have rejected quantitative in favor of qualitative methods, a position which might seem justified by feminist critiques of positivism. This paper examines both quantitative and qualitative methods in light of two major themes in radical feminist epistemology, the critique of objectivity and the politics of the research process, and finds both classes of methods vulnerable. We argue that underlying the argument against quantitative methods is a rejection of abstraction and a dichotomization of methodologies, both of which are inconsistent with feminist insights. We call for a reconstruction of methodology that transforms both quantitative and qualitative techniques in ways informed by feminist epistemology and builds research agendas that integrate both approaches.

HOLY MEN AND BIG GUNS The Can[n]on in Social Theory

Theory in sociology is constructed as a canon, a very short list of social theorists who have been endowed with suprahistorical status. Drawing on the feminist analysis of gendered consciousness, the author argues that social theory is organized exactly as it should be if one were thinking like a White male capitalist. The perceptual frameworks it employs—a hierarchy of the social, logical dichotomies, decontextualized abstraction, an individualist approach—resonate well with descriptions of hegemonic masculine consciousness. As a result, social theory has not just distorted social perception, it is becoming functionally irrelevant in contemporary social life. The author argues that reasonable understandings are more likely if we are developing via an epistemology of connection, moving from thinking of theory as a holy text to organizing theory to create bridges between diverse standpoints, across disciplinary boundaries, and between knowing and doing.

Sociology: the Good, the Bad, and the Public:

Since 2004, when Michael Burawoy used his American Sociological Association (ASA) presidency to make a case for the legitimacy of public sociology, we have seen a lot of discussion about it. Several professional meetings have been organized on the theme of how to be more effective at this work and there has also been debate about the wisdom of embracing public sociology. From all this attention and discussion, it would be easy to get the impression that we were witnessing a new movement in sociology. But, as Burawoy (2004) points out, sociology began as a public endeavor. The scientific study of society emerged in the early nineteenth century out of an impulse to use scholarship to address the ills of industrialization. The Holy Trinity of classical sociological theory, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, were addressing the social problems of their times. The roots of U.S. sociology are in the urban engagement of the Chicago School and of the women around Jane Addams who, excluded from Chicago’s department of sociology, conducted engaged research, teaching, and advocacy through Hull House (Deegan 1988; Ferree, Kahn, and Morimoto 2007; McAdam 2007). I had assumed that this public era of sociology was ancient history, before sociology developed as a science and as a profession. Reading some recent histories of our discipline and of feminism in the academy, I learned that respect for the practice of an engaged sociology persisted much longer than I had thought. Doug McAdam (2007) reports that in the post–World War II era sociology comprised two strongly overlapping camps. One camp resembled our contemporary stereotype of “mainstream sociology,” emphasizing the professional character of sociology, based on its value neutrality and quantitative skills and putting an emphasis on “technical innovation, normal science,

Research and reporting on the development of sex in fetuses: gendered from the start.

Research into human genetics has been expanding rapidly and most people learn about that research from mass media. Because prior research finds gender bias in aspects of both science and the media, we investigate the messages presented to the public concerning the relationship between biology and gender, taking as a case research on the genetic development of sexual difference before birth. We examine both the science that is getting media attention and the form that coverage takes. We find that gendered assumptions direct the science but also that scholarly discourse makes gender biases in method and interpretation accessible to scientific critique. On the other hand, mass media reporting ignores feminist critiques, marginalizes women and dramatically reinscribes gendered beliefs about the inherent superiority of men and the biological basis for gender differences in personality and behavior.

Feminist Epistemology, Feminist Methodology, and the Study of Gender

To build adequate knowledge, we need to be explicit about our epistemological assumptions so we can use these to critically assess our methodological choices. Of the four epistemologies in circulation, two, Positivism and Postmodernism, are inadequate for gender scholars’ goals. Positivist assumptions that we can minimize the impact of the subjectivity of the knower are undermined by social science findings. Postmodernist rejection of the possibility of achieving a rational understanding of the known undercut the very purpose of social science. So we are left with two choices—Critical Realism and Standpoint Theory. Critical Realism offers a nuanced and dynamic theory of the known but it is blind to the impact of the knower’s position in social relations of power. Standpoint Theory’s analysis of the knower as operating from a specific physical, social, and cultural context makes up for that deficit. Integrating the two in a Critically Realistic Standpoint Epistemology implies four methodological principles: (1) begin inquiry from the standpoint of the marginalized, (2) ground each person’s interpretation of phenomena in their material interests and experience, (3) maintain a strategically diverse discourse, and (4) create knowledge that empowers the disadvantaged.

Experiments in Knowing: Gender and Method in the Social Sciences

Part I: Modern Problems. 1. Who Knows?. 2. Paradigm Wars. 3. Hearing the Grass Grow. Part II: A Brief History of Methodology. 4. Cartesian Nightmares. 5. Mean Values. 6. Imagining Social Science. 7. Chance is a Fine Thing. Part III: Experiments and Their Enemies. 8. Experimental Sociology: The Early Years. 9. Of NITS and LIFE and Other Things. 10. Lessons from America. 11. The Rights of Animals and Other Creatures. Part IV: Moving On. 12. Peoples Ways of Knowing. 13. Challenges of an Experimenting Society. References.

The Structure of Political Thinking: A Multidimensional Model

Abstract The debate over whether or not the political belief system of the general public is in fact unidimentional is more than twenty years old and still unresolved. On the other hand, the assumption that political thinking should be unidimensional has been uncontroversial. This is intriguing since a unidimensional model of political thinking is inconsistent with what we know about politics — that it is an arena of multiple conflicting interests. It is also incompatible with what we know about the structuring of human perception — that it is context dependent. In this paper an argument is made that political consciousness should be characterized by multiple intersecting dimensions representing 1) basic conflicts in interest over class, gender, and community relations; 2) the social cleavage between dominance and nurturance, and 3) a distinction between the abstract analyses available to people and their sympathies in concrete situations. A model incorporating these dimensions is tested by means of a LIS...