I feel obligated to acknowledge that I'm sympathetic to the author's concerns here.<p>But I think she's neglecting the important reason <i>why</i> what she calls a "rational" approach is so popular: it's the only kind of approach that generalizes across different cultures. When you identify an object detection model that tends to perform poorly on people with dark skin, researchers in Dublin, Tokyo, Beijing, or Lagos can understand and agree with what you've found. If you want to find ways to reduce this bias, they'll all be able to help you look, and you can help them with their challenges in turn.<p>When you move to her "relational" approach, and start talking about "personhood, data, justice, and everything in between", those researchers are going to have wildly divergent and often irreconcilable views. Even two researchers in the same city might struggle to work together on these terms, if they come from different subcultures with different views about how the world should be. The possibility of cross-cultural collaboration is a big thing to give up, and to most people (including myself) it's really a core requirement for any scientific research practice.