By Katharine Sarikakis
Twitter: @grrlsrock
Connecting the world of systematic enquiry, academia, and the ‘real’ world has never been easy, straightforward or even acceptable – from either side. The world of academia has often looked down upon research and researchers who engage in the banality and temporarity of the ‘everyday’ or who become ‘involved’ in the world of politics. Both these positions are seen as impure, subjective, ‘too close’ to objects –or subjects- non-transparent and they entail not enough numbers. Involvement in the ‘real’ world entails, indeed, demands, a degree of normativity and is scrutinised on the basis of ethics of practice. As a matter of fact, there is very little space to hide when research is called to provide some concrete thinking about complex problems and to do so with the public interest in mind.
Sadly, it is all too familiar to the world’s populations that their politics, governments, markets do not always act in the public’s best interests. We see often how legitimacy is sorely lucking from public policy that despite its failure to protect the vulnerable and raise the average citizen’s quality of life, as is the case in the current crises, is further designed and followed. Under these circumstances, the engaged academic, the researcher and intellectual who attempts to lend a voice to less known facts, experiences and views is equally despised by the ‘real’ world.
The claims for objectivity through ‘equal distance’ by science and academia or the claims that science and scholarship is only valid if it can prove this ‘objectivity’ has been under scrutiny and strong criticism from within sciences and from the real world. The distance between academy as an ‘ivory tower’ and the messy, unruly, real world has never been more contested and challenged in the history of science and Higher Education.
This is good news.
Academia cannot pretend distance, non-involvement and detachment any more than claim that its research methods, funds or findings are without impact for itself and the ‘real’ world. In these terms, academia is part of the real world. The question is, whether it is part of the problems or the solutions.
Our epistemology guides us to look for answers into the social problems by questioning the setting and framing of the problems themselves. When we ask questions about media and communication regulation, our aim is to go to the core of the problem and treat it as a non-innocent question. This means we ask the question: ‘Who determines the problem?’ ‘Can it be approached in any other way, and if so, why isn’t it?’ Only from there, can we assess the proposed solutions. Nowhere is this perhaps more acute, constant and urgent as in policy making.
Our epistemology also demands that we prioritise the seeking out of the truth rather than make claims of equal distance: in other words, our methods take us to the absences (of voices, actors, propositions), the invisible views and historical marginalisations. To stay only with what is available and accessible means to stay with one aspect of the story, the picture is not complete, equal distance cannot be applied, it would not be of much use to claim or pursue it. On the contrary, to be alert and open, acknowledge absences and the limitations of science is more useful to the ‘real’ world and to the world of regulation. Accepting normativity as part of the research process, as an object of study, and as subject to process, allows policy scholars and media policy scholars to remain relevant, even if still unwelcome, and to serve society in their role of ‘translators’ between society, politics and knowledge across time.
We aim to be these translators who through systematic enquiry and methods appropriate to the object under study, and a sense of measure as Aristotle recommends, translate regulation to assessment of its acute or potential impact; propose new frames of normativity and challenge those proven to underperform; and aim to push the disciplinary boundaries further. Our blog is one of these forms we translate and that are translated.
Join us in reading, writing, researching and thinking about media, communication and the human condition.
Katharine Sarikakis
Director
Media Governance and Industries Research Lab
*A link to Prof. Sarikakis’ book chapter, “Stepping out of the Comfort Zone; Unfolding Gender Conscious Research for Communication and Cultural Policy Research, can be found here: http://homepage.univie.ac.at/katharine.sarikakis/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Sarikakis-K.-2012-Stepping-out-of-the-Comfort-Zone.pdf
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