[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about how the flaws in the ruling paradigm affect HR and what needs to be done about it. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–Ideological and interest driven biases can be powerful in shaping knowledge production.
1. Scientist-guardians-of-the-paradigm use a number of subtle mechanisms to shape and orient research funding, publication and even findings through the ‘art of paradigm maintenance’.* (R. Wade). In a detailed analysis of the World Bank’s research department, for instance, Robin Broad identified six mechanisms that create incentives that support this thinking: hiring, promotion, publishing, selective enforcement of rules/framing**, as well as disincentives for dissonant data and research, and even manipulating data.
*: Beware: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards over the guardians? (Juvenal, satirist poet, early second century Rome)
**: Framing is a powerful mechanism used by powerful institutions to guide global discourses.
Let me explain: Two complementary views
–In Gramsci’s view, the bourgeoisie (cleverly) imposes a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion.
2. An obedient technocracy? Often without acknowledging it, researchers today are the victims of a paradigmatic control that subjects them to systematic and ongoing pressure wielded by the powerful elites over science and universities. Higher education, particularly graduate studies in the Global South, reproduce and amplify an academic system subject to a clear intellectual-cultural dependency on the hegemonic models of the conservative North. These elites have enough power to not-fund dissuasive studies and to generate results that support their positions. [What are we talking about here?: Science that really risks going against science? ‘Sins of expertness’? Unilateral perspectives of an ‘illuminist vanguard’? Benefitting those in power rather than creating space for critical and transformative thought? Pick your choice].
3. The ruling paradigm uses scientific knowledge to also bias the horizon of scientific visibility by focusing exclusively on the facts that power designates as worthy of being known. This leads to an ethical collapse of policy and to the use of public funds to pass them over to companies and/or research that upholds existing power structures. This, indeed, has human rights (HR) implications, namely, the absence of laws and rules that protect HR stalls justiciability at a time when violations are occurring as a result of biased research (take the example of Big Pharma’s dubious claims). We, therefore, need to a) advance such laws and rules plus, b) in fact, actively defend an emancipatory ethics directed at overthrowing the paradigm that allows such behavior.
4. Thinking about ethics should not be an abstract academic theorization. Instead, it ought to be a reflection connected and directed to the common good that ultimately serves the strategic needs of society at large. Collectively, we have by and large stopped looking at social and scientific processes that are classist, racist, patriarchal, gender insensitive and homophobic that profoundly perpetuate inequity and inequality in our societies –we simply, therefore, have to look at these parameters. all linked to HR! In other words, we cannot just describe the surface of problems without getting to their roots, because they report only partial evidence without articulating it with the social matrix; without showing its relationship to the social reproduction of capital and the structural processes that generate them. In short, there is an urgent need for a counter-hegemonic science and ethics. (all by Jaime Breilh)
5. Decolonizing the prevailing theories, policies, and practice is about challenging the perceived universal order in which the scientific community normalizes science as it imposes the North’s accepted knowledge. It would thus appear to be necessary to review this all from a critical perspective, if nothing because the logic of living in a world of undisputed, monocultural, and all-encompassing scientific certainties is impregnated with racialization and white supremacy as a repetitive cut-and-paste process.
6. All this calls for suspending our routines of certainty, our hashtags, in order to return to the potential of producing alternatives of knowing-acting that come from the South.*** We need to liberate ourselves from paralysis and fears of criticizing the modern, universal, institutionalized scientific order –and not be fragmented in an immobilizing determinism, conceding to the universal monopoly of modern science, of what is true or false, and of what, in realty divides us when facing a dilemma of two universes: ‘this side of the line, and the other side of the line’.(all by Oscar Feo et al)
***: The future is too important to just wait for it. (Volodymyr Zelensky)
Bottom line:
7. When challenging the prevailing paradigm, beware of the difference between ‘responding’ and ‘reacting’. Responding, a spinoff of the word responsibility, is considerate and deliberate. Reacting, on the other hand, literally means to meet one action with another. It is more immediate.
8. Responding creates more space between an event and what you do, or do not-do about it. In that space, you give immediate emotions room to breathe, you gain a better understanding of what is happening. As such, you rarely regret responding. …But you often regret reacting. More and more of our environments are becoming decidedly reactive.
9. I feel that space between responding and reacting is collapsing. And if we do not do something about it, the consequences will be dire. The space for legitimate disagreement and discussion seems to be shrinking by the day, giving way to hatred. Our culture and economy encourage reactivity; as a result, we are becoming a more reactive people. At a time of most pressing challenges –war, pandemic, climate change, political dysfunction, HR violations–how much of a mix of responding and reacting is needed? Food for thought… (adapted from Brad Stulberg)