SCIENCES FROM BELOW: feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities*

摘要

Looking to the ways in which sciences and technologies from both the North and the South participate in the larger cultural and historical logics of imperialism, colonialism, sexism, and racism, Harding "calibrates" to each other "progressive tendencies in Northern science and technology studies, Southern science and technology studies, feminist work in both fields, and modernity studies" (p. 8).This necessarily broad approach pushes these different modes of critical inquiry into a similar metric, translating the stakes of each into a form legible to the others. The importance of vision from below underscores Harding's main theoretical and methodological commitment in this book: standpoint theory.Describing the origins of standpoint theory,Harding points to two key issues in feminist scholarship on the sciences: how even the most objective scientific practices-"good science"-produces sexist and androcentric knowledge, and how overtly feminist and politicized research, work that seemingly violates the norms of objectivity, produces successful results.A third principle, that of producing knowledge for women rather than about them, guides this work, and Harding emphasizes how such knowledge transforms women into subjects rather than objects of science.