Academic research is a seemingly harmless thing; it is something many of us do on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Though we do research at the UW, be it in the sciences or humanities, as students, we are rarely taught how to research. It seems simple, right? Just look in some books, talk to a few people and draw your conclusions from that information, right? This is how I approached the idea of research until fall quarter, when I took a class in the American Indian studies (AIS) department.

As a journalism major, I have been taught to seek the truth, and as an English literature major, I have been trained to form my own ideas and find others to support them. My AIS class blew these ideas out of the water. It questioned the central premise of what it means to do research — who benefits from it, who is harmed and what our options are in terms of methodology.

We are taught to research in a very individualistic, narrow sense. Instead of allowing our research to inform our ideas, more frequently, we are told to prove our idea in any way we can. The idea is to take knowledge, create knowledge and get credit for it.

We often fail to realize that our cultural norms inform the way we think about information — the purpose it serves, who has the right to access it and who should create it. We take for granted that cultural norms actually inform much of our research and findings. Academic writing frequently asks us to make a case so unemotional that our own biases are written as fact.

This problem is one that comes up in journalism ethics courses, but is rarely reflected in the journalism structure of our culture. We, the people writing these pieces, have a prerogative. We have pet peeves and pet causes, and these things will work their way into what we choose to write about and how we go about doing so. Journalism has never been about the “truth,” but about representing all sides of the story. The “truth” is far too elusive for any of us to believe we can find.

So what happens when we fail to consider a side simply because it never occurred to us? We fail to do our job.

An easy fix, suggested to me by an English professor of all people, is to put yourself into the piece. If you make your opinion on the subject known, it will be easier for the reader to judge the accuracy of the information and perhaps to see where the author’s blind spots are. Transparency is called for when making claims or telling stories that are not our own. It needs to be made clear that we do not have all of the answers, that we are interested in specific things, and that we all have shortcomings that inform our work.

Reach columnist Sarah Greenleaf at opinion@dailyuw.com.