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From Thompson, C.M., 2015. Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology
Studies Perspectives. In: James D. Wright (editor-in-chief), International Encyclopedia
of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Vol 22. Oxford: Elsevier, pp.
1–4.
ISBN: 9780080970868
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.
Elsevier
 Author's personal copy
Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology Studies
Perspectives
Charis M Thompson, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract
In this article, the feminist and science and technology studies roots of situated epistemology are discussed. The idea of
combining a commitment to a real world, albeit a constructivist one, with attention to practice and embodiment is assessed.
The controversial conferral of agency on nonhuman objects is similarly explicated. Finally, uptake and critique of the notion
of situated knowledges is addressed.
The expression ‘situated knowledge,’ especially in its plural
form ‘situated knowledges,’ is associated with feminist episte-
mology, feminist philosophy of science, and science and tech-
nology studies. The term was introduced by historian of the life
sciences and feminist science and technology studies scholar
Donna Haraway in her landmark essay Situated Knowledges: The
Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
(Haraway, 1991: 183–201). The essay was a response to femi-
nist philosopher of science Sandra Harding’s discussion of the
“science question in feminism” (Harding, 1986). In her analysis
of the potential of modern science to contribute to the goals of
feminism, Harding noted three different accounts of objective
knowledge in feminist epistemology: feminist empiricism,
feminist standpoint, and feminist postmodernism (Harding,
1986: 24–26). Feminist empiricism attempted to replace
more-biased with less-biased science. The feminist standpoint,
echoing the Marxist tradition from which it derived, stressed the
relevance of the social positioning of the knower to the content
of what is known. Feminist postmodernism accentuated the
power dynamics underlying the use of the language of objec-
tivity in science. Haraway, taking off from Harding, diagnosed
a ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of temptations between which femi-
nists attempt to navigate on the question of objectivity: radical
constructionism and feminist critical empiricism. As she put it,
what feminists wanted from a theory of objectivity was
“enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reducible to power
moves and agonistic, high status games of rhetoric or to scien-
tistic, positivist arrogance” (Haraway, 1991: 188). Her notion of
situated knowledges was her attempt to provide just such
a theory of objectivity.
Despite the single author provenance, the term resonated
with attempts by other scholars in the history, sociology, and
philosophy of science to address similar epistemological
tensions. The concept was quickly and fruitfully taken up in
science and technology studies and feminist theory, provoking
a certain amount of reworking in its turn.
‘Situated Knowledge’ and Objectivity: Constructed
Yet Real
The term ‘situated knowledge’ derives its theoretical impor-
tance from its seemingly oxymoronic character, particularly
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 22
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 1–4
when applied to knowledge about the natural world. It is
common to think of modern scientific knowledge as universal,
so that it has the same content no matter who possesses it. It is
also almost definitional to hold that objective knowledge is
warranted by the fact that it captures reality as it really is, rather
than being warranted by the situational circumstances out of
which the knowledge was generated or discovered (see Shapin,
1994: 1–8 for discussion of, and citations relevant to, various
manifestations of these points). Thus, if the law of gravity
enables us to make reliable experimental predictions, it is
because there is such a thing as gravity that is adequately
captured by our scientific understanding; in short, the truth of
the knowledge is its own warrant. It is only in the case of false
or superseded knowledge that we typically explain what went
wrong by reference to faulty assumptions, sloppy work, ill-
calibrated equipment, the Zeitgeist, or other aspects of the
context of discovery. The idea of ‘situated knowledge’ contests
these supposed concomitants of objective knowledge. It
suggests that objective knowledge, even our best scientific
knowledge of the natural world, depends on the partiality of its
material, technical, social, semiotic, and embodied means of
being promulgated.
Haraway’s notion thus had affinities with other feminist
epistemologies, which had noted that facts can differ in their
content from one time, place, and knower to another (e.g.,
Collins, 1989). It also had sympathies in common with soci-
ologists of science and scholars of science and technology
studies who have suggested that capturing ‘reality as it really is’
may be dependent on institutional, technical, and cultural
norms (Kuhn (1962/1970)), on practice (Clarke and Fujimura,
1992; Pickering, 1992), and attempts to witness, measure,
comprehend, or command assent to it (Latour, 1987; Shapin,
1994; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). All these scholars shared
a search for the theoretical resources to do justice to the
embeddedness of science and truth. These challenges to
conventional views of objectivity brought situated knowledges
into conversation with key debates in the philosophy of science
around the theory-ladenness of facts (Hesse, 1980: 63–110).
Additionally, the suspicion of transcendent universalism
entrained an epistemological and political distrust of clear-cut
distinctions between subject and object, and a blurring of the
distinction between context and content of knowledge or
discovery.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.85031-X 1
 Author's personal copy
2 Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology Studies Perspectives
Situated knowledges are as hostile to relativism as they are
to realism. Haraway describes relativism as “being nowhere
while claiming to be everywhere equally” (Haraway, 1991:
191) and realism as “seeing everything from nowhere”
(Haraway, 1991: 189), and conceives of them both as ‘god-
tricks’ promising total, rather than partial, located, and
embodied, vision. In contrast to realist or relativist epistemol-
ogies, Haraway sees the possibility of sustained and rational
objective inquiry in the epistemology of partial perspectives.
This requires, she maintains, reclaiming vision as a series of
technological and organic embodiments, as and when and
where and how vision is actually enabled. This crafting of
a feminist epistemology of situated knowledges on the basis of
vision and partial perspective is noteworthy. The links in the
history of science to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and
male supremacy have been theorized around the masculinist
gaze of the powerful but disembodied knower disciplining and
subjugating the weak by means of a multitude of technologies
of surveillance. Feminists have lamented the privilege granted
to the visual as a sure basis of knowledge and bemoaned the
sidelining in modernity of what some cast as more feminine
and less intrinsically violent ways of knowing involving
emotion, voice, touch, and listening (Gilligan, 1982). Haraway
was concerned that feminists not cede power to those whose
practices they wish critically to engage. It is in this spirit that she
grounded her feminist solution in an embrace of science and
vision, “the real game in town, the one we must play”
(Haraway, 1991: 184).
The Feminist Roots of the Dilemma
A tension between emancipatory empiricism and its associated
egalitarian or socialist politics, and feminist postmodern con-
structionism and its associated identity politics, resonates
throughout contemporary Western feminist theory. It is a hall-
mark of those engaged in feminist philosophical and social
studies of science that they seek to resolve one or another
version of this tension. One horn of the feminist dilemma,
according to Haraway, represents the good feminist reasons to
be attracted to radical constructionism. Feminist post-
modernists, and analysts of science and technology influenced
by semiotics (including Haraway herself), helped develop and
often appealed to “a very strong social constructionist argu-
ment for all forms of knowledge claims” including scientific
ones (Akrich and Latour, 1992; Haraway, 1991: 184). This
position had the benefit of showing the links between power –
such things as status, equipment, rhetorical privilege, funding,
and so on – and the production of knowledge and credibility.
The downside, from the point of view of feminists interested in
arguing for a better world, is that the radical constructionist
argument risks rendering all knowledges as fundamentally
ideological, with no basis for choosing between more and less
just ideas, more and less true versions of reality. As Haraway
provocatively expressed it, embracing this temptation seemed
to leave no room for “those of us who would still like to talk
about reality with more confidence than we allow the Christian
right’s discussion of the Second Coming and their being
raptured out of the final destruction of the world” (Haraway,
1991: 185).
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 1–4
The second horn of the dilemma, according to Haraway,
involves “holding out for a feminist version of objectivity”
through materialism or empiricism (Haraway, 1991: 186).
Haraway briefly discusses both Marxist derived feminisms and
feminist empiricism. Feminisms with Marxist inspirations are
several, and their genealogy can be traced in a number of ways.
Feminists have long criticized Marxist humanism for its
premise that the self-realization of man is dependent on the
domination of nature, and for its account of the historical
progression of modes of production that grants no historical
agency to domestic and unpaid labor (Hartmann, 1981). Some
have responded by developing feminist versions of historical
materialism (Hartsock, 1983). Feminist standpoint theorists
appropriated the general insight, inherited from both Marxist
thought and the sociology of knowledge, that one’s social-
structural position in society – such things as one’s class or
relation to the means of production, or one’s gender or eth-
nonational characteristics – determines or affects how and
what one knows (Smith, 1990).
Likewise, the idea that some social-structural positions
confer epistemological privilege has been widely adopted by
standpoint theorists and feminist epistemologists arguing for
specifically feminine ways of knowing (Rose, 1983). ‘Seeing
from below,’ that is, from a position of subordination, has
commonly been theorized by feminists as the position of
epistemological privilege, on the grounds that those with little
to gain from internalizing powerful ideologies would be able to
see more clearly than those with an interest in reproducing the
status quo. In Patricia Hill Collins’ version of standpoint
theory, for example, these insights are used both to validate the
knowledges of the historically disenfranchised and to reverse
the hegemonic ranking of knowledge and authority, and claim
epistemological privilege for African-American women
(Collins, 1989).
Psychoanalytic theory, particularly Anglophone object
relations theory, inspired some of the early writings on gender
and science (Chodorow, 1978; Keller, 1985). Object relations
theory attempted to explain the different relation of women
and men to objectivity, abstract thought, and science in
modern societies. To account for this difference, the theory
posited gender-based differences in the socialization of sons
and daughters in Western middle-class heterosexual nuclear
families. Boys, according to this theory, are socialized to
separate from the primary caregiver who is the mother in this
normative family scenario. They thus learn early and well by
analogy with their emotional development that relational
thinking is inappropriate for them; separating themselves from
the object of knowledge, as from the object of love, is good.
Girls, on the other hand, are supposedly socialized to be like
their primary caregiver, so that they can reproduce mothering
when their turn comes. Relationality and connectivity, not
abstraction and separation, are the analogous ordering devices
of girls’ affective and epistemological worlds. As applied to
objectivity and scientific knowledge, object relations theory
seemed to explain to feminists, without resort to distasteful
biological determinisms denying women scientific aptitude,
why women were excluded from much of science and tech-
nology. It also suggested that there were (at least) two distinct
ways of knowing, and that much might have been lost in the
violence and separation of masculinist science that could be
 Author's personal copy
Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology Studies Perspectives
restored by a proper valuation of the feminine values of
connection and empathy (Harding, 1986; Keller, 1983). Like
Marxism, psychoanalytic approaches to objectivity gave femi-
nists a means to show the relevance of one’s social position to
knowledge. Like feminist empiricism, they encouraged the
belief in the possibility of an improved, feminist, objectivity
(Harding, 1992).
The feminist canon contains a number of empirical studies
that have revealed the negative effects of such things as
colonialism and stereotypes about race and gender on the
production of reliable science (Fausto-Sterling, 1995; Martin,
1991/1996; Schiebinger, 1989; Traweek, 1988). Evelyn Fox
Keller’s call for “dynamic objectivity” (Keller, 1985: 115–26)
and Sandra Harding’s demand for “strong objectivity”
(Harding, 1992: 244) are exemplary of the aspirations of
theoretical feminist empiricism. These projects seek to
prescribe scientific methods capable of generating accounts of
the world that would improve upon disembodied, mascu-
linist portrayals of science because they would be alert to the
practices of domination and oppression inherent in the
creation, dissemination, and possession of knowledge.
Feminist empiricism nonetheless remains problematic
because of its reliance on the dichotomies of bias vs. objec-
tivity, use vs. misuse, and science vs. pseudoscience. The
feminist insight of the “contestability of every layer of the
onion of scientific and technological constructions”
(Haraway, 1991: 186) flies in the face of leaving these epis-
temological dichotomies intact.
Subjects, Objects, and Agency
Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges problematizes both
subject and object. Unlike standpoint theories which attribute
epistemological privilege to subjugated knowers, and the
sociology of knowledge which attributes espitemological
privilege to those in the right structural position vis-à-vis
a given mode of production, Haraway attributes privilege to
partiality. This shift underscores that “situated knowledge” is
more dynamic and hybrid than other epistemologies that take
the position of the knower seriously, and involves “mobile
positioning” (Haraway, 1991: 192)
In situated knowledges based on embodied vision, neither
subjects who experience, nor nature which is known, can be
treated as straightforward, pre-theoretical entities, “innocent
and waiting outside the violations of language and culture”
(Haraway, 1991: 109). Haraway maintains that romanticizing,
and thus homogenizing and objectifying, the perfect subju-
gated subject position is not the solution to the violence
inherent in dominant epistemologies. As feminists from
developing countries have also insisted, there is no innocent,
perfectly subjugated feminist subject position conferring epis-
temological privilege; all positionings are open to critical
reexamination (Mohanty, 1984/1991). Subjectivity is instead
performed in and through the materiality of knowledge and
practice of many kinds (Butler, 1990: 1–34).
Conversely, the extraordinary range of objects in the phys-
ical, natural, social, political, biological, and human sciences
about which institutionalized knowledge is produced should
not be considered to be passive and inert. Haraway says that
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition, 2015, 1–4
3
situated knowledges require thinking of the world in terms of
the “apparatus of bodily production.” The world cannot be
reduced to a mere resource if subject and object are deeply
interconnected. Bodies as objects of knowledge in the world
should be thought of as “material-semiotic generative nodes,”
whose “boundaries materialize in social interaction” (Haraway,
1991: 201). The move to grant agency to material objects places
the epistemology of situated knowledges at the center of
scholarship in science and technology studies (Callon, 1986;
Latour, 1987).
Uptake and Critique
Donna Haraway’s essay ranks among the most highly cited
essays in science and technology studies and has been
anthologized. As stated above, situated knowledges is
a provocative and rich methodological metaphor with reso-
nances in many quarters. The dialogue between Harding and
Haraway continued after the publication of Situated Knowl-
edges (Harding, 1992: 119–163). Her epistemology directly
influenced, and in turn was influenced by, the work of soci-
ologists and anthropologists of science (Clarke and Montini,
1993; Rapp, 1999), feminist philosophers of science (Wylie,
1999), and practicing feminist scientists (Barad, 1996). In
addition, ‘situated knowledges’ was used as a standard tech-
nical term of the field by more junior scholars, including many
of Haraway’s former students. Over time, the idea of situated
knowledges has appeared in more domains, including schol-
arship on education and the environment (e.g., Lang, 2011;
Calvert, 2012).
Critics of situated knowledges have been few. Timothy
Lenoir has pointed out that many of the epistemological ideas
behind Haraway’s situated knowledges are found not only in
other major strands of science and technology studies, but
also in the work of continental philosophers such as Nietz-
sche. He likewise critiqued the idea of situated knowledges for
its dependence on the apparatus of semiotics (Lenoir, 1999:
290–301). Historian Londa Schiebinger, in her book
summarizing the effects of a generation of feminist scholar-
ship on the practice of science, placed Haraway’s situated
knowledges together with Harding’s strong objectivity as
attempts to integrate social context into scientific analysis
(Schiebinger, 1999). Implicit critiques have been leveled
against the limitations of the idea of being situated, for
example, in the development of De Laet’s and Mol’s mobile
epistemology (De Laet and Mol, 2000). Sheila Jasanoff and
her colleagues argued for bringing differently spatialized
entities such as the nation, the local, and the global into the
epistemology of science and technology studies, while
retaining the insights gained by paying attention to practice,
vision, and measurement. These critiques stand more as
continuing conversations with, than rebuttals of situated
knowledges, however. Scholars and former Haraway students
have continued to work with situated knowledges and its
limits (e.g., Charis Thompson’s (2014) loss of her field-site,
and Kim TallBear’s (2013) idea of ’rootedness’ and ‘routed-
ness’). Overall, the idea of situated knowledges remains
central to feminist epistemology and science studies and to
attempts to understand the role of modern science in society.
 Author's personal copy
4 Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology Studies Perspectives
See also: Anthropology of Knowledge; Contextual Studies:
Methodology; Cultural Studies of Science; Knowledge,
Sociology of; Science and Technology, Anthropology of;
Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of; Standpoint Theory, in
Science.
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