Today's entry comes from the University of Victoria, where someone earned a PhD in the School of Indigenous Governance, which I had never heard of but appears to be where ordinary academic standards go to be ceremonially sacrificed.
The dissertation is titled, "Mnidoo-mkwendamwin: Beading and Restitching with Ancestral Threads of Memory." And before the dissertation even begins, we of course get a mandatory land acknowledgment.
The abstract opens with a typo. It says, quote, "This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices." It appears to be missing the word 'of' there, but maybe proofreading is an oppressive colonial construct as well.
But it gets better, or worse, however you look at it. The author says the dissertation documents how to make, quote, "ancestral knowledge encodements" through "indigenous beadwork, textile, other fiber arts." It seems to be missing the word 'and' there as well. So that's two typos, and we haven't even moved beyond the first sentence yet
It then explains that beading is, quote, "indigenous resurgence" explored through the author's intersecting lenses of being a, quote, "chronically ill neurodivergent two-spirit Mississauga Nishabi Lucanan artist and scholar."
The abstract also says that, quote, "the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture" are only viewed as separate entities "due to colonization."
This dissertation is based on so-called "indigenous knowledges." But while cultural traditions, stories, and art can be personally meaningful, when universities start treating them as co-equal with scientific knowledge and dismiss skepticism as a form of colonial oppression, we've left the realm of serious scholarship entirely and dove headfirst into mystical woo-woo.
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This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge enc
Abstract
This work was created to go beyond the study cultural mnemonic devices and into the realm of documenting how to make ancestral knowledge encodements that synthesize research through Indigenous beadwork, textile, other fibre arts. Beading is Indigenous resurgence that connects me to my ancestors, and this research delves into what that means in a grounded wholistic way through my intersecting lenses of being a chronically ill neurodivergent Two-Spirit Mississauga Nishnaabe Lucbanin artist and scholar. Conceptualizations around the body, mind, spirit, land, and material expressions of culture are often thought of as separate entities due to colonization, so a foundational part of this work examines approaches to Indigenous ideas of wholeness in community and identifies what forms of decolonization and resurgence can facilitate reconnection with the spiritual. Beads come together and interplay with one another in similar ways that gained wisdoms do within the research process. While the overall design that is created through knowledge is powerful and important, so is every stitch that makes that design come into being. Each relative who collaborated on this dissertation brought a prismatic array of experiences and played a powerful role in shaping the trajectory of the ancestral knowledge encodement of this work in the Ngwaagan Regalia (2025). Throughout the dissertation are ancestral knowledge encodementsâcreated through historical inspiration, depictions of relatives, tea-visits with kin, and narratives shared by family and community members. The encodements created and embedded into this written dissertation take the forms of photographs, historical images, digitally stitched collages, digital mixed media illustrations, paintings, and diagrams. I have chosen to honour this tradition of weaving in the threads of previous generations and connecting it to those in the future through integrating ancestral mkwendamwinan (memories) in the same way that I am including contemporary conversational dbaajmownan (stories).
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Art is not science. Any form of "knowledge" which is inaccessible to all but an anointed, special few is not "knowledge."
âFactâ is not anybodyâs experience; it states the experience of no one in particular. ⊠By definition, then, if we take the empirical rule (no personal authority) seriously, revelation cannot be the basis for fact, because it is not publicly available. Similarly, attempts to claim a special kind of experience or checking for any particular person or kind of personâmale or female, black or white, tall or shortâare strictly illicit. ⊠if you make different rules for black and white checkers, you are not doing science. ⊠if the way you are checking works only for people with a sympathetic attitude, or if your results are not replicable by others in a reasonably regular fashion, you are not doing science. ⊠If the way you are seeing and explaining works only for the religious, you are breaking the rules.
â Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"
"Positionality Statements," like pronouns-in-bio, are not completely useless. They're red flags offered up willingly that tell you someone is not to be trusted or should be ignored.
By shifting attention away from methods and toward identity, positionality statements may actually increase bias.
By: Colin Wright
Published: Mar 28, 2025
Some readers may know that I often post ridiculous, ideology-driven academic papers and dissertations on X (formerly Twitter). Itâs become a bit of a hobbyâcalling out how certain fields have drifted into performative activism disguised as serious scholarship. Some of the worst examples turn into full-blown posts here on Realityâs Last Stand, where I break down not just whatâs wrong with them, but why everyone should care. However, thereâs one academic trend that I repeatedly encounter but rarely highlight, perhaps because itâs become so common it fades into the background: the âreflexivityâ or âpositionalityâ statement.
I recently posted an especially absurd example on X, where the authors felt the need to let readers and potential reviewers know that they were all âcis-gender menstruating individuals who identify as intersectional feminists,â among other things.
Although these statements are most commonly found in the usual âwokeâ or âgrievance studiesâ disciplinesâfields that openly reject traditional scientific norms and standardsâthey are now creeping into mainstream, even top-tier, science journals. What started as a practice mostly limited to qualitative research in the social sciences has now spread much more widely. Take this example from a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution:
We should all certainly hope that the authors have been âeducated in a predominantly EuroâAmerican cultural context and scientific tradition,â given that the paper is published in a Europe-based science journal!
So whatâs going on here? What exactly is a positionality statement, and why are researchers including them?
In short, a positionality (or reflexivity) statement is a formal acknowledgment by researchers of their own social identitiesâsuch as race, gender, class, sexuality, or other âlived experiencesââthat may have shaped their perspective on the research topic. Think of it like a conflict-of-interest (COI) disclosure, except instead of revealing financial ties that might compromise a researcherâs objectivity, the author is confessing their social location and ideological commitments.
Supporters of this practice claim it promotes transparency. They say itâs just being honest: all people have biases, so why not acknowledge them up front? But the reasoning gets much more ideological than that. Their view isnât just that people are shaped by their environmentâwhich is obviously trueâbut that all knowledge is socially situated. This belief comes from a branch of feminist and postmodern philosophy known as âstandpoint epistemology.â According to this view, people from marginalized groups enjoy a kind of âepistemic privilegeâ: because of their lived experiences, they are thought to have special access to certain truths, especially about oppression and injustice. However, this epistemic privilege has been extended to scientific truths as well. The fatal flaws in this philosophy will be made clear later on.
On the surface, positionality statements seem nobleâwho could be against reflection and transparency? But when you start looking at it more closely, many serious issues begin to surface.
The most thorough critique of positionality statements Iâve seen comes from a paper titled âPositionality and Its Problems: Questioning the Value of Reflexivity Statements in Researchâ by Jukka Savolainen, Patrick J. Casey, Justin P. McBrayer, and Patricia Nayna Schwerdtle, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science. In it, the authors lay out three major objections to the practice, each of which should give serious pause to anyone who believes science should be guided by evidence and logic instead of ideology.
Positionality Statements Are Fundamentally Flawed
The first objection is philosophical: positionality statements are inherently self-defeating. They attempt to disclose how a researcherâs identity may shape their perspective on a topic, but the very epistemology that justifies positionality statementsâstandpoint theoryâalso undermines the credibility of any such self-disclosure.
As Savolainen et al. point out, reflexivity statements are âconstrained by the very positionality they seek to express.â The idea here is almost paradoxical: if your identity shapes and distorts your view of the worldâincluding your ability to reflect on yourselfâthen your positionality statement is just as distorted as your research. âLike a scale that tries to weigh itself,â they write, âconstructing a credible positionality statement is ultimately an impossible task.â If you genuinely believe that your social location biases everything you do, then the positionality statement you construct to describe that bias is already infected by the same problem.
Advocates of positionality statements might respond: Sure, nobody is perfectly objective, but researchers can still identify some facts about themselvesâlike race, sex, class, or gender identityâthat provide readers with useful context. The authors acknowledge this objection. Yes, it is âquite easy for scholars to accurately report their biological sex, their gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, and many other personal characteristics.â These are, to some extent, knowable and reportable.
But as the authors rightfully highlight, those things are often the least relevant to the scientific content of a study: âWe take issue with the assumption that these kinds of attributesâthe listing of which dominates positionality statementsâare particularly salient for any given study.â Just because a researcher is white or black, rich or poor, or âcisâ or âtrans,â doesnât automatically mean those characteristics shaped the research process or interpretation in any meaningful way. And if they did, simply reporting them does not magically make that bias evaporate.
To drive the point home, the authors analyze a published positionality statement (below) by Elliott and Reid (2019), where two white women reflect on the âdangersâ of writing about low-income black Americans.
The authors of this statement claim to be guided by âanti-racist, intersectional, and feminist principlesâ as a way of signaling their political virtue and awareness. But as Savolainen and his colleagues point out, why focus only on those traits? Why not mention other potentially relevant parts of their identity, like their religion, education, or personality? As the authors ask, âWhy did the authors reflect on the âdangersâ of racial and class dynamics but seemed unbothered by their strongly expressed political commitments?â
Their point is that these statements often highlight only the identity traits that are currently popular or politically favored, while ignoring others that might matter just as much. This selective framing undermines the supposedly honest and reflective nature of the exercise, turning it into a performance, perhaps often crafted to align with disciplinary norms or to curry favor with reviewers and editors.
This leads to a tough but fair question: âShould the research community trust the authors themselves to decide which aspects of their lives need to be disclosed to people who read their research contributions? We think the answer is âno.ââ
And this isnât just a problem with one paperâitâs a problem with the entire practice. Positionality statements claim to reduce bias, but in reality they often just amplify the authorâs subjectivity under the illusion of self-awareness.
The authors sum it up:
Our point is to illustrate the challenges involved in crafting a positionality statement of any kind. These kinds of statements are unpersuasive because academic scholars cannot have it both ways. They cannot, on the one hand, claim to be burdened by their biography when conducting the research, yet, on the other hand, be emancipated from it while constructing a positionality statement. Fortunately, as we demonstrate next, this inescapable dilemma is not something that needs to be solved.
Positionality Statements Misdiagnose the Source of Scientific Bias
The second problem is that positionality statements focus on the wrong kind of bias. Bias in science does not primarily originate from individual characteristicsâyour race, gender, politics, or upbringingâbut from a failure of the process by which knowledge is created, tested, and refined. Scientific bias is not reduced or eliminated by announcing your identity; it is reduced by rigorous methodology, peer review, replication, and being open to criticism.
As Savolainen and colleagues put it, âPositionality statements are beside the point: By focusing on the characteristics of participating scholars, these kinds of declarations miss the true sources of research biasâthe fieldâs collective failure to adhere to the scientific ethos.â Science doesnât work because scientists are unbiasedâthey arenât. It works because the system is designed to push everyoneâs ideas through a rigorous, competitive process that filters out error over time.
Ironically, by putting the spotlight on personal identity instead of scientific methods, positionality statements may actually increase bias. Instead of focusing on methods, data quality, and replicability, we are asked to judge research in part based on the authorâs race, gender, or ideological alignment. Thatâs not objectivityâitâs just replacing one kind of bias with another.
Positionality Statements Undermine the Norms That Protect Science
Finally, and perhaps most dangerously, positionality statements erode the very norms that make science trustworthy in the first placeâespecially the principle of universalism. This is the idea that scientific claims should be judged by the strength of the evidence, not by who is making the claim. What matters is the quality of your data and reasoning, not your identity.
But when journals start asking (or requiring) researchers to include positionality statements, they flip that principle on its head. Instead of suppressing identity cues through double-blind peer review, we now ask authors to foreground them. That opens the door to identity-based favoritism, virtue signaling, and even manipulation. Authors may exaggerate or fabricate aspects of their biography if they believe it will help them get published. And letâs be honest: positionality statements are only encouraged in one direction. Progressive researchers are encouraged to share their âmarginalizedâ identities or activist goals. No one is asking conservative, religious, or apolitical scholars to declare their âlived experiencesâ or ideological frameworksâunless to apologize for them.
As Savolainen and co-authors put it, positionality statements have become âa way for authors to signal their adherence to the ideological mainstream of a discipline.â Itâs less about being transparent and more about proving youâre on the âright side.â Often, these statements read like a shield: âWe are good and right-thinking researchersâplease donât peer-review us too hard.â
This gets to a deeper and more cynical interpretation of the trend. As Iâve often pointed out, thereâs a growing body of academic work that looks more like propaganda in the language of scholarship. Positionality statements are part of that performance. Yes, it's true that personal identity and politics can influence research. But the idea that simply declaring your bias somehow cancels it out is ridiculous. In practice, it often does the oppositeâit gives researchers permission to lean even harder into their bias while pretending to have neutralized it.
We all have biasesâthat's just part of being human. But science wasnât created to embrace our personal views; it was built to help us control for them. The purpose of peer review, replication, and methodological rigor is not to validate personal perspectives but to test them against reality.
If we want a more inclusive, robust, and representative science, we should be pushing for better methods, open data, and viewpoint diversityânot more identity-based posturing. As Savolainen and colleagues argue, âthe most productive path to increasing representation and reducing positional bias in research is to protect the freedom of scholarly inputs while insisting on methodological transparency and rigor.â
Science doesnât need more confessionals. It needs more rigor.
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This is the endorsement of the Genetic Fallacy as a moral imperative.
Xians tell me that I'm disqualified from criticizing Xianity because I'm not a Xian. Muslims tell me that what I have to say about the quran is irrelevant.
Except, neither of those things are true.
If you're giving "positionality statements," you're not doing science.
Me: *Begins updating positionality statement while reviewing the materials suggested by my professor*Also me: So, I see you got started. Cool, cool, cool. Now, try that again without sounding passive aggressive. Love you!
