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at least be translateable into a language understandable by society at large (Heller 1989: 74).
Unfortunately, many of the ideas offered by critical scholarship, although of tremendous
relevance for thinking about knowledge within the confines of dominant academic practice,
employ such specialized language as to render them of limited use to “outsiders” who don’t
possess the same field-specific conceptual baggage, and of no use at all to the subordinate
social actors whom critical theory is purportedly created to serve. English language and
financial barriers to entry compound this problem even further by severely constraining
participation within global academic circuits themselves, and by limiting the diversity of
worldviews capable of engaging in scholarly debates.
Reflexivity and academic research
If the social positionality or the locus of enunciation of scholars themselves affects
all aspects of academic practice, most importantly, the way in which sense is made of the
world, how can these factors be interrogated sufficiently enough to allow our objects of
study to be heard in their difference and not be simply reinserted into our own scholarly
narratives? This is precisely the dilemma posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1994)
when she asks whether or not the subaltern can speak. Her conclusion is quite dim indeed:
when marginal subjects are finally “heard” in first world academic circles, they have already
been subsumed within dominant frameworks of knowledge and have thus been divested of
their capacity for agency and voice as subalterns. In consequence, creating channels of
symmetrical communication with “others” that are different from oneself constitutes one
of the primary challenges faced by all conceptual perspectives aspiring to reflexivity.
While positivism argues in favor of suspending the subjective traits of the knowing
subject, my discussion of everyday life and knowledge suggests that this is not only
ludicrous but also dangerous, given that notions of universality and objectivity have
historically informed hegemonic knowledge projects. Feminists suggest that the solution
lies in denying the privileged position of the observer vis-à-vis the observed and in
confronting the hierarchies implicit in subject-object relations (Tickner 2005: 8). This
means that the identity politics at play in the relationship between knower and known must
be acknowledged and disengaged. In practice, Jill McCorkel and Kristen Myers (2003: 228)
suggest that the researcher’s gaze must essentially be redirected from her object of study
toward herself. Such a gesture of self-reflection often entails the vexing discovery that our
own explanations of the world don’t necessarily coincide with the lived experience of those
we study, introducing a healthy dose of humility and doubt into the practice of knowledge-
building itself.
I suspect that Said’s (1994) idea of speaking truth to power implies just this. For
him, the major questions confronted by the intellectual are how to speak the truth, what
truth one should speak, for whom and where. He identifies increasing professionalism in
academic life as posing a significant obstacle to the realization of this task, given that it
prizes expertise and specialization and nurtures the exercise of knowledge for power,
essentially numbing the senses that any academic must bring with her when engaging in
intellectual activity (Said 1994: 76-78). Adopting the role of the traveler or amateur, on the
contrary, involves being responsive “[…] to the provisional and risky rather than the
habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo”
(Said 1994: 64). Speaking truth to power suggests that critical reflexivity in everyday
academic life is best achieved by dismissing the idea that experts are privileged knowers, by
abandoning the role of gatekeepers and dismantling disciplinary gates, by asking who
Convention