An Ethic of Linguistic Injustice: The Language of Objectivity As the Language of the Oppressor

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I make sense of my encounters with the language of objectivity as a student, tutor, mentor, and researcher. I rely on Dorothy E. Smith’s conceptualisation of the ethic of objectivity, a practice that requires the student to devalue their embodied experience while ripping it from their experiential knowledge, which in turn they must rewrite in the language of objectivity. In conversation with Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, I reflect on whose perspective the language of objectivity represents. In doing so, I argue it is the language of the oppressor, and thus, the ethic of objectivity creates in the student an internal division between an experienced world written in their own language and an objectified world written in the oppressor’s language. Identifying the ethic as an expression of dominant language ideology, I suggest that any critical writing pedagogy must relinquish the ethic of objectivity.