ABSTRACT
Criticality is a self-conscious posture and attention to “the way different kinds of linguistic, social, political and theoretical elements are woven together in the process of knowledge development, during which empirical material is constructed, interpreted and written” (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2000: 5). Yet, it possesses two distinct qualities. First, it recognizes the different dimensions of knowledge production whether in light of the researcher’s reflexive objectification of the researched, the researcher’s insertion within a scientific field and their relations with other researchers, and, finally, the influence of this scientific field on the construction of the researched (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992b). Second, it avoids a disengagement (Haraway 1988: 590) from acknowledging and accepting the political posture behind every choice made in the mediation between ontology, epistemology, and methods. Criticality in a research design precisely guides the self-conscious mediation between these different dimensions of the research under the premises that the knowledge originating from, pertaining to, and produced by the researcher will be a politically-situated knowledge (Haraway 1988).
