Positionality Statements

In case you haven’t seen them yet, I want to call your attention to the latest attack on the scientific method: positionality statements, in which authors attach totally irrelevant personal information to their scientific manuscripts. Typical of the illogic of our schizophrenic age, this is occurring at the same time that the NSF has banned any personal information on official biosketches, for good reason:

Individuals are reminded not to submit any personal information in the biographical sketch. This includes items such as: home address; home telephone, fax, or cell phone numbers; home e-mail address; driver’s license number; marital status; personal hobbies; and the like. Such personal information is not appropriate for the biographical sketch and is not relevant to the merits of the proposal.

To give a concrete example of what a positionality statement looks like, see the following:

Nan Crystal Arens (she/her) is a White, cisgender, heteroromantic woman and professor in the Department of Geoscience at Hobart & William Smith Colleges (HWS). She was a first-generation college student with a learning disability that significantly slows her parsing and processing written language. HWS is a predominantly White, private undergraduate institution where faculty are encouraged to engage actively in scholarship, although both time and resources for this component of faculty work are extremely limited. HWS faculty in the natural sciences boast a strong tradition of including undergraduate students in their research, as reflected here. Arens's advocacy for greater inclusion of historically marginalized people in STEMM arises both from her experience as a woman in geology and paleontology and as the mother of two cisgender women who are just beginning to confront the inequities of the world.

"Levi Holguin (he/they) is a person assigned female at birth, neurodivergent, queer, first-generation college student, and part of an immigrant family. They come from a low-income background and are a devotee of folk Catholicism. Many of his identity markers challenge normative standards in the several communities of which he is a part. This draws them into conversations regarding gender and intersectionality. He was motivated in this work by the desire to make change that will open opportunities for marginalized people.

"Natalie Sandoval (she/her) is an undergraduate Latina attending a predominantly White, private institution as a first-generation student. She is cisgender and queer, does not live with a disability, and from a low-income immigrant family. Growing up in an immigrant Latino family, she is no stranger to forced gender roles and machismo, which draws her to gender studies and equity issues. She has done previous research on gender representation in STEMM careers and feelings of belonging on campus. Her previous research also includes family planning and contraceptive use. She is a community advocate through the National Diversity Coalition and seeks opportunities to improve gender equity, accessibility, and human rights through community advocacy and policy change."

Positionality statements are a flagrant violation of one of the key Mertonian Norms of science, universalism, which states that “scientific validity is independent of the sociopolitical status/personal attributes of its participants.” They are not just political grandstanding, which is bad enough, but actually act to undermine the ideal of the disinterested collection of evidence and development of explanatory theories by the scientific method, and therefore decrease confidence in scientific results. In science, it doesn’t matter if your father was a prince or pauper, what you look like, where you came from, or what naughty stuff you do with whom. Science is science, data are data, and bullshit is bullshit. In order to preserve the integrity of the scientific process, journals should ban positionality statements, and we, as reviewers, should automatically reject any paper that includes them.