Research and the pursuit of truth

Presented at the DC Research Café (November 29, 2020). Roberta Staley’s presentation explores the social, economic, political, and health impacts of international journalism and academic research on the world’s most vulnerable -- women, children, and animals. Topics include: Women’s rights and education in Afghanistan, and the role of female Afghan reporters and filmmakers in exposing violence against women, and the laxity of laws meant to protect them. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and how international coverage focusing on the cost of rebuilding ignores the repercussions of the quake and its aftermath on the country’s most vulnerable -- women and children. Female genital mutilation (FGM) in Kenya, and the role of reporting in helping to eliminate the practice through highlighting alternative ceremonies for girls, and reinforcing the positive economic, social, and health outcomes accompanying the elimination of FGM. The impacts of increasing numbers of women scientists and academics in Canada -- and their contributions to human health -- in pushing for alternatives to using laboratory animals in research and testing by demonstrating the practices’ limitations, and instead promoting gene editing techniques as the way of the future. Ultimately, Staley argues, it is the lives and wellbeing of the most vulnerable -- human and non-human -- that should feed our research, not only in the social sciences, but in the sciences too. We must all be beholden to the truth, and it’s a moral and ethical duty to seek it out in the humblest of places -- the places where truth quietly lives.