Course overview
All knowledge, including research knowledge, is created from particular subject positions. In Western research traditions, such positionality has been and predominantly continues to be rooted in values which favour whiteness and colonialism, heterosexuality and cisnormativity, ability and individualism. Further, such subject positions shape how researchers design their research, what kinds of questions they ask, and how they report their results. Such research reporting occurs in peer-reviewed publications, public media, and informal discussion. This course raises critical questions about the social, political, historical, and ethical contexts of research writing by focusing on marginalized groups and intersections between marginalized identities.
Approaching this work from a writing studies perspective, we will be particularly interested in how the shifting values and ethics informing research practice are mirrored in the language features, rhetorical choices, and textual structures of research writing. To investigate these discourse features, we will consider the history of how these groups have been conceptualized and treated in research practice, and investigate how recent incursions into this history, particularly by members of these groups, “speak back” to Western research traditions. We will consider how this speaking back happens in research publications as well as in more public arenas, and you will explore how your work can contribute in a potentially public way.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Link questions of research ethics to language practices within research publications by tracing ethical attitudes via discourse analysis.
- Place research practices related to marginalized populations in the context of the history of research ethics by identifying paternalistic, colonial, supremacist, and antagonistic ways of thinking in relationship to marginalized populations and recognizing contemporary changes to conceptualizing and positioning marginalized populations within research.
- Analyze the discursive constructions of researcher positions by describing language features that signal and construct research positionality and relating researcher positionality to social, ethical, and disciplinary purposes.
- Analyze the discursive construction of research participants via discursive elements and language features.
- Analyze research writing critically by synthesizing history of research writing and formulating questions that contribute to the research community.