26 March

Round table: Power and Inequity in Research

-Professor Tracey McIntosh (Co-Head of School, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies, UoA)

-Dr Jemaima Tiatia-Seath (Co-Head of School, Te Wānanga o Waipapa, School of Māori Studies and Pacific Studies, UoA)

-Dr Ann Bartos (Environment, UoA)

-Daniel Hernandez (Anthropology, UoA)

 

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Great Work: The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, or Dostoyevsky’s works.

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The question of objectivity in research was raised within the panel.

Objective data calculated by statistics only represents a specific lens of an object or institution under study. Yet crucial metaphysical, existential, spiritual and cultural aspects are omitted. Perhaps a holistic approach should be undertaken, rather than the dominant objective, rational methodology which dominates Western academic research.

 

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead (1862)

 

Professor Tracey McIntosh spoke about the relationship between recidivism and conditions within the prisons. She presented statistical facts about the NZ prison system, yet I found the most enlightening part of her data set to be the anecdotal evidence she observed about prisons and the human condition. Prisoners are stripped of their individual dignity and self-respect, made to be nothing but prisoners by guards who only enforce authority. The routine searches before leaving the cell and re-entering the cell every day, mirror the abusive circumstances that female prisoners in particular lived through before incarceration. Only by stepping into the prisons and observing the psychological damage created by the institution through Tracey’s senses and Being was she able to establish this relationship, through the human and moral connection with the inmates.

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn inspired the dismantling of the gulags and the Soviet Union merely by writing a novel about the destruction of the human spirit within the gulags. The catastrophic violations to a human’s physical, moral and spiritual condition written through anecdotes and moral contemplation was enough to enact institutional reform.

 

Perhaps using other perspectives and research methods, whether spiritual, moral or matauranga Maori, can do more for institutional reform than objective data can.

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Written by Anna Kalatcheva.