Whose Science Whose Knowledge Sandra Harding Student Edition

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Sandra Harding Student Edition Prepared by: Dr. Kay Picart

Related Websites n http: //ww. cddc. vt. edu/feminism /Harding. html n http: //www. gseis. ucla. edu/facul ty/pages/harding. html

Introductory Questions What is “science”? n What constitutes n “knowledge”? n

Introductory Questions n n What does the term “feminist” mean? Do “feminism”/s and critiques of culture or politics have anything to contribute to discussions concerning the epistemology and ethics of science?

Key Themes: Fill in the blank. n n n n n “Feminist analyses of science, technology and knowledge are not ____lithic. There is no single set of claims beyond a few generalities that could be called ‘feminism’ without controversy among feminists. ” (6)

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks n “Science is p_______ by other means, and it also generates reliable information about the empirical world. Science is more than politics, of course, but it is that. ” (10)

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks “Science contains n both progressive and n r_______ tendencies. n So does feminism. ” n (10) n

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks n n n n “The same can be said of feminism. It too contains both progressive and regressive tendencies. It is not usefully conceptualized without qualification as inherently good--and of course no one characterizes it as value-n______. . . ” (1011)

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks n n n n “The observer and observed are in the same causal plane. . . Neither knowers nor the knowledge they produce are or could be impartial, dis______, value-neutral, Archimedean. . . ” (11)

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks n “We cannot ‘strip nature bare’ to ‘reveal her s______, ’ as conventional views have held, no matter how long the striptease continues or how rigorous its choreography, we will always find under each ‘veil’ only nature-as-conceptualized -within-cultural-projects; we will always (but not only) find more veils. . . ” (12)

Key Themes: Fill in the blanks n n n n “It is necessary to decenter w_____, m______-class, h_____sexual, Western women in Western feminist thought and yet still generate feminist analyses from the perspective of women’s lives. . . ” (13)

Key Themes: n “. . . Gender is fundamentally a r_______, not a thing. . . As Judith Butler argues, gender is not an ‘interior state’ but a p_____ that each of acts and reenacts daily. . . ” (13)

Key Themes: n “Gender relations in any particular historical situation are always constructed by the entire array of h______ social relations in which ‘man’ or ‘woman’ participates. The forms of femininity prescribed for the plantation owner’s wife was exactly what was forbidden for the black slave woman. . . ” (14)

Key Themes: n “The n_______ sciences are illuminatingly conceptualized as part of the s_____ sciences. What kind of theoretical framework will enable us to understand sciences-in-society and the consequent society-in-sciences? ”

Key Discussion Question n Why is “Physics” a bad model for physics?

Guide Questions for Next Meeting Why does Minh-ha entitle her essay “Outside in, Inside Out”? n In what ways do Minh-ha’s documentary films problematize the politics of the gaze in contemporary film-making? n