Feminist standpoint theory has been marginal to mainstream philosophical analyses of science–indeed, it has been marginal to science studies generally–and it has had an uneasy reception among feminist theorists. Critics of standpoint theory have attributed to it untenable foundationalist assumptions about the social identities that can underpin an epistemically salient standpoint, and implausible claims about the epistemic privilege that should be accorded to those who occupy subdominant social locations. I disentangle what I take to be the promising core of feminist (...) standpoint theory from this conflicted history of debate. I argue that non-foundationalist, non-essentialist arguments can be given (and have been given) for attributing epistemic advantage (rather than privilege) to some social locations and standpoints. They presuppose a situated knowledge thesis, and posit contingent advantage relative to epistemic purpose. I illustrate these claims in terms of the epistemic advantages that accrue to a fictional character, from Neely’s novel Blanche on the Lam, who represents a type of standpoint invoked by diverse advocates of standpoint theory: that of a race, class, and gender disadvantaged “insider-outsider” who has no choice, given her social location, but to negotiate the world of the privileged while at the same time being grounded in a community whose marginal status generates a fundamentally different understanding of how the world works. (shrink)

1. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Introduction 2. KAREN BARAD--Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices 3. MARIO BIAGIOLI--Aporias of Scientific Authorship: Credit and Responsibility in Contemporary Biomedicine 4. PIERRE BOURDIEU--The Specificity of Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason 5. ROBERT M. BRAIN and M. NORTON WISE--Muscles and Engines: Indicator Diagrams and Helmholtz’s Graphical Methods 6. MICHEL CALLON--Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fisherman of St. Brieuc Bay 7. SANDE COHEN--Reading Science (...) Studies Writing 8. H. M. COLLINS--The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks 9. LORRAINE DASTON--Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective 10. ARNOLD I. DAVIDSON--Styles of Reasoning, Conceptual History, and the Emergence of Psychiatry 11. PETER GALISON--Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief 12. IAN HACKING--Making Up People 13. DONNA J. HARAWAY--Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective 14. ROGER HART--On the Problem of Chinese Science 15. THOMAS P. HUGHES--The Evolution of Large Technological Systems 16. LILY E. KAY--In the Beginning Was the Word?: The Genetic Code and the Book of Life 17. EVELYN FOX KELLER--The Gender/Science System: or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science? 18. ROBERT E. KOHLER--Moral Economy, Material Culture, and Community in Drosophila Genetics 19. BRUNO LATOUR--Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World 20. BRUNO LATOUR--One More Turn After the Social Turn... 21. TIMOTHY LENOIR--Was the Last Turn the Right Turn?: The Semiotic Turn and A. J. Greimas 22. GEOFFREY LLOYD--Science in Antiquity: The Greek and Chinese Cases and Their Relevance to the Problems of Culture and Cognition 23. MICHAEL LYNCH and JOHN LAW--Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching 24. DONALD MACKENZIE--Nuclear Missile Testing and the Social Construction of Accuracy 25. EMILY MARTIN--Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State 26. ANDREW PICKERING--The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science 27. THEODORE M. PORTER--Quantification and the Accounting Ideal in Science 28. PAUL RABINOW--Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality 29. HANS-JORG RHEINBERGER--Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration and Deconstruction 30. BRIAN ROTMAN--Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality 31. JOSEPH ROUSE--Understanding Scientific Practices: Cultural Studies of Science as a Philosophical Program 32. SIMON SCHAFFER--Late Victorian Metrology and Its Instrumentation: A Manufactory of Ohms 33. STEVEN SHAPIN--The House of Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England 34. SUSAN LEIGH STAR and JAMES R. GRIESEMER--Institutional Ecology, "Translation," and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39 35. SHARON TRAWEEK--Pilgrim’s Progress: Male Tales Told during a Life in Physics 36. SHERRY TURKLE--What Are We Thinking about When We Are Thinking about Computers? 37. ALISON WYLIE--The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies. (shrink)

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the ways in which knowledge--scientific, social, and cultural--is produced are undergoing fundamental changes. In The New Production of Knowledge, a distinguished group of authors analyze these changes as marking the transition from established institutions, disciplines, practices, and policies to a new mode of knowledge production. Identifying such elements as reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and heterogeneity within this new mode, the authors consider their impact and interplay with the role of knowledge in social relations. (...) While the knowledge produced by research and development in science and technology is accorded central focus, the authors also outline the changing dimensions of social scientific and humanities knowledge and the relations between the production of knowledge and its dissemination through education. Placing science policy and scientific knowledge within the broader context of contemporary society, this book will be essential reading for all those concerned with the changing nature of knowledge, with the social study of science, with educational systems, and with the correlation between research and development and social, economic, and technological development. "Thought-provoking in its identification of issues that are global in scope; for policy makers in higher education, government, or the commercial sector." --Choice "By their insightful identification of the recent social transformation of knowledge production, the authors have been able to assert new imperatives for policy institutions. The lessons of the book are deep." --Alexis Jacquemin, Universite Catholique de Louvain and Advisor, Foreign Studies Unit, European Commission "Should we celebrate the emergence of a 'post-academic' mode of postmodern knowledge production of the post-industrial society of the 21st Century? Or should we turn away from it with increasing fear and loathing as we also uncover its contradictions. A generation of enthusiasts and/or critics will be indebted to the team of authors for exposing so forcefully the intimate connections between all the cognitive, educational, organizational, and commercial changes that are together revolutionizing the sciences, the technologies, and the humanities. This book will surely spark off a vigorous and fruitful debate about the meaning and purpose of knowledge in our culture." --Professor John Ziman, (Wendy, Janey at Ltd. is going to provide affiliation. Contact if you don't hear from her.) "Jointly authored by a team of distinguished scholars spanning a number of disciplines, The New Production of Knowledge maps the changes in the mode of knowledge production and the global impact of such transformations. . . . The authors succeed . . . at sketching out, in very large strokes, the emerging trends in knowledge production and their implications for future society. The macro focus of the book is a welcome change from the micro obsession of most sociologists of science, who have pretty much deconstructed institutions and even scientific knowledge out of existence." --Contemporary Sociology "This book is a timely contribution to current discussion on the breakdown of and need to renegotiate the social contract between science and society that Vannevar Bush and likeminded architects of science policy constructed immediately after World War II. It goes far beyond the usual scattering of fragmentary insights into changing institutional landscapes, cognitive structures, or quality control mechanisms of present day science, and their linkages with society at large. Tapping a wide variety of sources, the authors provide a coherent picture of important new characteristics that, taken altogether, fundamentally challenge our traditional notions of what academic research is all about. This well-founded analysis of the social redistribution of knowledge and its associated power patterns helps articulate what otherwise tends to remain an--albeit widespread--intuition. Unless they adapt to the new situation, universities in the future will find the centers of gravity of knowledge production moving even further beyond their ken. Knowledge of the social and cognitive dynamics of science in research is much needed as a basis of science and technology policymaking. The New Production of Knowledge does a lot to fill this gap. Another unique feature is its discussion of the humanities, which are usually left out in works coming out of the social studies of science." --Aant Elzinga, University od Goteborg. (shrink)

Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians (...) of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again.... For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, _New Statesman_ "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, _American Historical Review_ "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

"The classic and recent essays gathered here will challenge scholars in the natural sciences, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and women’s studies to examine the role of racism in the construction and application of the sciences. Harding... has also created a useful text for diverse classroom settings." —Library Journal "A rich lode of readily accessible thought on the nature and practice of science in society. Highly recommended." —Choice "This is an excellent collection of essays that should prove useful in a wide range (...) of STS courses." —Science, Technology, and Society "... important and provocative... "—The Women’s Review of Books "The timeliness and utility of this large interdisciplinary reader on the relation of Western science to other cultures and to world history can hardly be overemphasized. It provides a tremendous resource for teaching and for research... "—Ethics "Excellent." —The Reader’s Review "Sandra Harding is an intellectually fearless scholar. She has assembled a bold, impressive collection of essays to make a volume of illuminating power. This brilliantly edited book is essential reading for all who seek understanding of the multicultural debates of our age. Never has a book been more timely." —Darlene Clark Hine These authors dispute science’s legitimation of culturally approved definitions of race difference—including craniology and the measurement of IQ, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and the dependence of Third World research on First World agendas. (shrink)

The essays in this volume bring to their focuses on philosophical issues the new angles of vision created by the multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms that have been developing around us.

In this pioneering new book, Sandra Harding and Robert Figueroa bring together an important collection of original essays by leading philosophers exploring an extensive range of diversity issues for the philosophy of science and technology. The essays gathered in this volume extend current philosophical discussion of science and technology beyond the standard feminist and gender analyses that have flourished over the past two decades, by bringing a thorough and truly diverse set of cultural, racial, and ethical concerns to bear on (...) questioning in these areas. Science and Other Cultures charts important new directions in ongoing discussions of science and technology, and makes a significant contribution to both scholarly and teaching resources available in the field. (shrink)