The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

by Andrew Doyle

It seems counter-intuitive, but positionality is now a dominant framework in higher education. This is why the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington DC, recently included ‘objectivity’ on a short list of ‘harmful research practices’. Objectivity, it is claimed, is based on ‘the belief that neutrality on a subject is the best way to determine its facts’, allowing researchers ‘to define themselves as experts without learning from people with lived experience’. Even ‘rigor’ is considered harmful because it involves ‘following an established research protocol meticulously instead of ensuring data are contextualized and grounded in community experience’. This attack on traditional standards in academia is derived from what is known as ‘standpoint epistemology’ which goes beyond questioning the motivations and methodology of researchers according to group identity but confers an advantage on those who have ‘lived experience’ of marginalisation. As philosophy professor José Medina writes, ‘there is a cognitive asymmetry between the standpoint of the oppressed and the standpoint of the privileged that gives an advantage to the former over the latter’.