Yes! I totally agree. I think that scientists need to engage more consciously with political and social life because really, what use is science if it isn’t relevant to the issues of the day? It is absolutely permissible for scientists to become advocates in their field of research.
Actually, I would say that scientists are always already advocates of certain positions and that objectivity is always a partial perspective enmeshed in particular time and place. In other words, there can be no easy distinction between advocacy and objectivity. Every research question adheres to a particular perspective on epistemology (how do we know what we know?), on methodology (how can we know for sure what we know?) and method (how do we get there?). All of these (epistemology, methodology, and method) have social and political implications. However, up until about 40 years ago, they were believed to be neutral pursuits of Truth that existed above the messy fray of “reality”, thus forgetting Virchow’s wise words that science should be engaged with “reality”, however messy it may be. Much to the credit of the new social movements (civil rights, feminist, gay) “objectivity” in research has taken on a completely different meaning.
Lately, I have been inspired by Kim TallBear’s work on Native American DNA. What could be more “objective” or “neutral” than documenting DNA lineages? She argues that the ownership of DNA by researchers risks extending the history of “ownership” that has been an essential part of white supremacy in the United States. She also challenges the idea that scientists “give DNA back” to communities of color. She writes, “In thinking about the ethics of accountability in research (whose lives, lands, bodies are inquired into and what do they get out of it), the goal of ‘giving back’ to research subjects seems to be a key symptom of a major disease in knowledge production, but not the crippling disease itself…We must soften the boundary erected long ago between those who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge production are extracted.” She goes on to consider flexible research strategies that would get us beyond the researcher/researched, objectivity/advocacy divide, including:
1. Research as co-production, as a networking event--rather than “about” subjects
2. Research s an opportunity for conversation and sharing knowledge--not “data gathering”
3. Research must be conceived in less linear ways without necessarily knowable goals at the outset.
4. A researcher who is willing to learn how to ‘stand with’ a community of subjects is willing to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced.
(See Tallbear, K. Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry)