Critical Research

Critical Research

Critical research is a loosely defined genre of social inquiry whose central theme involves the problematization of knowledge. Knowledge is not simply a matter of representing and explaining reality but rather a social phenomenon itself, having substantive– constitutive relations to personal identities, social practices, institutions, and power structures. This includes knowledge produced by social researchers; therefore, critical research must profoundly include a self-reflexive or reflective component.

Most critical research practiced at this time draws from both critical theory and poststructuralism/postmodernism despite the differences between them. This is possible because there are intersections between critical theory and poststructuralism/ postmodernism at the level of methodology and at many levels of sociocultural criticism.

Foucault’s research methods are called archaeology and genealogy. Both are ways to study knowledge in the human sciences as discourse practices that construct specific forms of the human subject   internally (e.g., “the insane,” “the criminal,” “the sexual deviant”), mask the arbitrary form of these constructions, and then subjugate the constructed subjects to punishment, discipline, examination, and surveillance.

Contradictions in the notion of the human subject as it emerged at the end of the 18th century are regarded as insightful—not condemning—by critical theory. Philosophies based on dialectical reason modified Kantian insights to argue that existence itself is contradictory.

Freedom is a state of knowing one’s self to not be anything objective, but self-knowledge requires objectivations from which to reflect. Hence, in different ways, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Karl Marx developed theories in which the epistemic subject–object relation has an ontological status; knowledge is part of an existential spiral in which subjectivity acts to objectivate (“posit”) itself and then reflects from the objectivations to know itself and know itself as free.

In Hegel and Marx, the subject is transindividual—a cosmic subject for Hegel and a species subject for Marx—and develops itself through history with the staged overcoming of alienated forms of self-understanding.

Critical theory has had a first generation, which emphasized dialectical reason but sought to combine it with Weberian social theory and the psychoanalytic tradition, and a second generation, which shifted from dialectics to intersubjectivity. The theory of communicative action developed by Jürgen Habermas has been most influential for contemporary forms of research informed by critical theory. Such research makes use of virtually all research methods available to the social sciences at this time, including empiricist methods, interpretive hermeneutic methods, critical hermeneutics, and systems theory. What makes research critical are not the methods employed but rather the theory of knowledge and society used in designing a study and interpreting results. A typical critical research project will artfully combine several methods.