https://soundcloud.com/thefamiliarstrange/ep107-bittersweet-stories/s-ypb6wv7jImj?si=ed6c91095baf4866878caee7be61817d&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing In this episode Familiar Stranger sat down with Fijian author and political analyst Edward Narain and Associate Professor Tarryn Philips from La Trobe University. Together Edward and Tarryn published Sugar: An Ethnographic Novel which reveals the extent to which the lives, health, and opportunities of Fijians are still dramatically affected by the country’s colonial … Continue reading Ep#109: Bittersweet Stories from Fiji with Dr Tarryn Phillips and Edward Narain
Month: July 2024
“Socially-Constructed” Does Not Mean “Not Real:” Knowledge-Making and the Meaning of Subjectivity in the Social Sciences
In any kind of research, there is more than one way to interpret what we are observing. The Positivist intent though, would be to find the “correct” interpretation that would lead one to the objective, universal truth, discarding all other interpretations as the useless results of human bias, error, and preconception. But what if, instead, we stopped searching for the One Truth (which may or may not even exist, and even if it does, humans might not be able to directly access it) and began to view truths as plural. That each piece of knowledge we gain is really a part of something larger, with a whole picture that only begins to come into focus the more of these partial truths we amass and fit together.