Doing science, and especially social science, is a political act. Researchers are in unique positions of power. We make choices about what sorts of science to do, what aspects of humanity deserve highlighting, whose voices (including our own) to elevate (1/n)

In other words, there are often winners and losers in science. If you dispute this, its likely because you have the privilege of not being on the losing side. (2/n)

Example 1: men win and women lose in medical research because studies are almost always designed around men. (3/n)

Example 2: Settlers win and Indigenous people lose in decades of bad conservation science designed to disposes them of their land with purportedly “unbiased” definitions of “nature” (4/n)

Example 3: Settlers win, and Indigenous people lose, in bad genetic science that assumes one’s cultural heritage and identity is coterminous with their genetic material. (5/n)

Example 4: white people win, and People of Colour lose, due to decades of bad science arguing a (nonexistent) biological basis of race. (6/n)

Example 5: Cis-gendered, heterosexual people win, and everyone else loses, from a century or more of science based on naïve (at best) notions of sex, gender, and sexuality. (7/n)

The point is, science is never objective because it inherits any number of biases and agendas from society and from the researcher. Indeed, even the quest for said objectivity is problematic, based as it is on enlightenment notions of domination and control. (8/n)

Yet, the institution of science is powerful in that it is established as an arbiter of truth. This power of science, and hence, of the scientist, is why we need a solid ethical framework for doing science. (9/n)

That framework can’t ignore or be ambivalent to the inequities inherent to the world around us. It must be actively antiracist, anticolonial, and emancipatory, lest it reinforce or recreate these inequities. (10/n)

At universities, we rely heavily on ethics boards for guidance but this is a bare minimum. How we develop collaboration, who ought be involved, the terms of reference we establish for data sharing, intellectual property, & publishing, are all essential ethical undertakings (11/n)

I recently shared a story about this from my own research, as a case in point. (12/n) https://twitter.com/ConserveChange/status/1299463283343327232?s=20

In response, some questioned whether the ethical principle of “nothing about us without us” introduces bias to research. That concern misunderstands bias. We’ve been taught bias is a bad thing, and it can be if its hidden or ignored. (13/n)

Bias is a natural feature of all self-regulating systems. It is the setting around which a system self-regulates—the setting on the thermostat. It *cannot* be eliminated. (14/n)

Our systems of knowledge are self-regulating systems, with deep cultural myths and psychological features like confirmation bias and base-rate bias that reconcile new information with our current preferred understanding of the world (15/n)

Bringing people into a collaboration *does* introduce new biases, and that’s the goal—bringing multiple systems of knowledge together! Its like investigating something with multiple different kinds of instruments and experiments at the same time. (16/n)

This is transdisciplinarity. The biases are all explicit parts of the context of the data, analyses, and inferences they produce. It produces richer and more robust understanding than could narrow lines of inquiry that pretend bias doesn’t exist in the first place (17/n)

It replaces the notion that someone can hold a singular “right” understanding of the world, with the acknowledgment that there are multiple “right” understandings, & that collaboration and cross-cultural understanding bring us to a fuller, but always incomplete, picture (18/n)

Don’t mistake “many right ways to know the world” for “no wrong ways”. That’s a slippery slope fallacy. Collaboration and transparency can inoculate against denialism and pseudoscience (19/n)

But when we argue that individuals have the power to create one “true” understanding, that’s when science becomes an instrument of control. (20/20).