When curiosity sends the wrong message
Keynote · Canadian Sex Research Forum · October 2020 · 50 min
Speaking at the Canadian Sex Research Forum as a psychotherapist and social worker, Rahim adapts a talk first written for sex therapists for researchers. He treats the audience much as he would his clinical supervision clients, guiding them through a reflexive process across the stages of knowledge production. He separates reflexivity from reflection: reflexivity means examining an experience while accounting for your own subject position and what it lets you see.
To make this concrete, he builds a mock quantitative study of sexualized drug use among gay men with a small, mostly white sample, then questions each stage. At the design stage he asks about the researcher’s own identity, their connection to the topic and their proximity to the community, recalling researchers who interviewed him in leading ways to confirm a hypothesis. On recruitment, he points to cold calls to overstretched community agencies, token diversity on posters and meagre incentives, and asks why researchers want a racially diverse sample in the first place.
On data and findings, he argues that extending recruitment once too few men of colour have signed up comes too late, and that small, unanalysed subgroups end up relegated to the margins. He encourages researchers to bring communities in to help interpret results, to ask what race is meant to stand for (chronic stress, migration history, internalized racism, access to care, or overlooked sources of resilience such as religion), to look at class beyond an income checkbox, and to pilot measurement tools with the communities involved. He also calls for knowledge translation plans from the outset and for researchers to help frontline practitioners evaluate practice-based interventions.
The second half turns to sex and relationship therapists. Rahim asks clinicians to examine their own attitudes toward receiving therapy and medication, to learn the DSM and CBT before critiquing them, and to consider who in the system tends to be over-diagnosed or misdiagnosed. He then presents a case of a young woman on disability leave who is focused on online dating, and deliberately poses curious-sounding questions that, once she is understood as neurodivergent, map onto common ableist microaggressions: denying her reality, measuring her personhood by her employability and minimizing her needs through comparison.
He closes by arguing that research objectivity and the therapeutic blank slate are false paradigms, because curiosity is never neutral. His practical takeaway is to build accountability into the work, through clinical supervision, community review of tools and interventions, and ongoing attention to whose experience is being treated as the norm.
What it covers
- Reflexivity in research and therapy
- Recruiting racially diverse samples
- Community-engaged knowledge translation
- Ableism and neurotypical assumptions
- Microaggressions in clinical practice
- Accountability through supervision
Related on this site
Archived record: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19167513
