Where do we go with our criticality?

It is interesting that Dawson talks about the shift in University funding from liberal arts disciplines toward biotech, “where professors also tend to be CEOs of start up firms flush with venture capital” (p. 78). I am not sure who or what the target of such criticism is. Is it the professor who seeks corporate funding for his research program, or is it the research program itself which needs such funding. Sure, corporate funding is the major source of funding outside of government agencies, and corporates would definitely have profit-based motives in mind when they fund research. But does that automatically negate the value of such research? Is the value of my friend’s research on aging and hearing diminished by the possibility that the fruits of his labor may be co-opted in the future by a corporate? It is perhaps feasible for graduate students and professors in the social sciences to conduct research that is untainted by grants but I am certain that is not the case in the physical sciences, life sciences, and engineering. The research conducted by our colleagues in the so called hard sciences requires massive investment. We can as critical scholars stop right here and question the need for and the objectives of research that is so hungry for capital. Or, we could move forward and ask what a researcher in the “hard sciences” who does not explicitly identify with a particular politics or ideology can do to negotiate his/her way through the morass of grant funding and conducting productive research. It does not serve the purposes of the critical project to brand all those who conduct such research as stooges of the neoliberal monolith because many of these researchers have opinions about the ethics and politics of doing research that converge with thinking on the left. Consider for instance, the recent controversy over global warming wherein errors in reported statistics led to concern over the claim that increases in the global mean air temperature were attributable to human actions. While there certainly were errors in the reports generated by the IPCC, these errors in no way dilute the argument that human beings are indeed the primary contributors to global warming today. The basis for this claim is the consensus among scientists who study climate change for a living. Modeling climate change on a global scale is an extremely complex process with multiple models, and methods offering insight on the phenomenon of interest, viz., climate change. The consensus that emerges among researchers studying climate change is a sure reflection of the social construction of science. Having said that, climate change is as true a phenomenon as inequality. In fact a cursory look at the list of nations opposing and supporting the Kyoto Protocol gives one a very clear idea of where the North and the South lie with respect to the climate change debate. Under the circumstances, a communication researcher who is invested in the critical project is in a great position to critically examine the claims made by opponents of climate change and join hands with climatologists who are being derided in the mainstream media for the irregularities in their scientific practices. A communication researcher can demonstrate how the scientific process is also a social process. More importantly, a communication scholar can prove how the fact that science is inherently social can be used as a tool in the hands of different ideologies to make different claims, even when the process of science (social as it might be) throws light on what and where the answers are. As the world moves to an era of climate futures where prediction markets bet on the climate change, the time of its occurrence, and its effects, we need to join hands with colleagues across disciplines to challenge structures that manipulate research for perpetuating prevailing inequalities.