Situated Knowledge

I'm just thinking through this term 'situated knowledge' and what happens when I take it seriously. In a general sense it is usually used to indicate types of knowledge which are specific to people who occupy particular social situations; so for example, the knowledge that a woman has of childbirth may necessarily be more complete in some ways than a man can have, and this knowledge is therefore situated according to the different places held by women and men within biological 'space'. This spatial metaphor which figures knowledge as scattered across a plain on which 'knowers' are differently located is futher elaborated by an act of social imagining in which these seekers after knowledge might rise from the surface into the air and gain the overview and higher perspective offered by height. This generalising of knowing through an occupying of an additional dimension seems also to underpin Nagel's 'View from Nowhere'. Maybe a truly 'objective' position is impossible, at least as long as our thinking is constrained to concepts like 'position.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• situated
• knowledge
• knowing
• philosophy
• feminism
• epistemology
• Donna
• Haraway
• Thomas
• Nagel
• objectivity
• metaphor
• space
• Isaac
• Newton

[aprudy]

Coming to your video from extensive engagement with Haraway, it seems to me that your emphasis on the spatial metaphor focuses too much on the individual-as-isolated-subject and knowledge-of-objects where each phenomena is discretely located in space and time. Haraway's concern with situated knowledges is a critique of feminist standpoint epistemologies which reify the relation between biology/sex and knowledge/subjectivity.

[milkeddowncocobrown]

... My phone is fucking up btw

[milkeddowncocobrown]

your right we can take a stance of a world view, but to understand anything we have to have a personal view point to bring back to our perspective. If not we are mindless animals not willing to come to an understanding. And really i think it is better to detach our self from this body to get a really deep understanding. but when u come back to a perspective you have to have a view point or else u might not find your mind. But understanding is the key to interpretation of our self and the world

[almafarag]

yes and it also may be the case that we inhabit numerous situations or contexts each and every day and these contexts (with family, alone, in WC, in the shop, at work, on the tram, etc) elicit different emotional and conceptual orientations because the conceptual (or etiquette) affordances of the actual environments set up distinct agendas for sensorimotor engagement.. ok, now I'm getting convoluted, yet, you see what I mean,

incidentally, you look rather tired, and yet sound really collected :)