What is the place of subjectivity in sociological study? More or less, I found myself newly informed by the Gregory reading (especially in regards to the statement made on the stereotypical views of impoverished groups as being disorganized and helpless), however I also found myself intensely distrustful of some of the historical accounts—not because I don’t think any of these issues didn’t happen, far from it, but because of the admittance of the author on the tilt he was putting on it. Objectivity is impossible, I get that—the golden objective standard for journalism is fast becoming a funny thing people used to strive for, and the “impartial observer” is little more than a myth—but the acknowledgement of recolored history made me more skeptical than I feel I should have been for any point of the author’s to get through. “While doing my fieldwork,” Gregory writes, “it quickly became apparent that activists continually recollected and reworded Corona’s history to provide meaning and context, as well as narrative authority, to interpretations of contemporary social conditions.” (14) Then, later, “If my writing of this history has been skewed by the ways in which activists selectively reuse the past, it has also been shaped by my own, equally particular, theoretical and political commitments.” (15) The problem I find with these quotes is more or less the problem that’s apparent in Govan’s action of “[dismissing] decades of people and events with an impatient wave of his hand,” and the further problem of the proliferation of the stereotype of the welfare queen (which seems to be more or less the same action but with the blinders covering up different angles)—the complexity goes unrealized and, as such, the account becomes biased in a way that’s too blatant for the role of the study of how people work. As in the Kleniewski readings, there’s an attempt to simplify trends which leads to an impossibility to find what’s seemingly true: “Thus, the ecologists’ search for a model to describe ‘The City’ was frustrated by the complexity of actual cities.” (27) The problem here doesn’t seem so much to be one of some baseless redirection but of an exchange of sympathy—away from accounts that might might complicate the sympathy and a redrawing of lines to make sympathy easier. This seems to me to be a failure of empathy. But the problem then becomes: if objectivity is impossible, and the acknowledgement of directed subjectivity seems untrustworthy, how can empathy be projected more boldly into every account, and how can complexity be more truly realized? How do you balance the need for truth to systems with the need for your point about the systems to get across?

—Kyle