Feminist critiques of science (original) (raw)
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Subjects , Power , and Knowledge : Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science
2015
Feminists, faced with traditions in philosophy and in science that are deeply hostile to women, have had practically to invent new and more appropriate ways of knowing the world. These new ways have been less invention out of whole cloth than the revival or reevaluation of alternative or suppressed traditions. They range from the celebration of insight into nature through identification with it to specific strategies of survey research in the social sciences. Natural scientists and laypersons anxious to see the sciences change have celebrated Barbara McClintock’s loving identification with various aspects of the plants she studied, whether whole organism or its chromosomal structure revealed under the microscope. Social scientists from Dorothy Smith to Karen Sacks have stressed designing research for rather than merely about women, a goal that requires attending to the specificities of women’s lives and consulting research subjects themselves about the process of gathering informati...
Philosophical Feminism: Challenges to Science
Resources for Feminist Research , 1987
Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the "core literature," and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about the status of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, "Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science," which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography. See: Alison Wylie, Kathleen Okruhlik, Leslie Thielen-Wilson and Sandra Morton, "Feminist Critiques of Science: The Epistemological and Methodological Literature," Women's Studies International Forum 12.3(1989): 379-388.
Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science
Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science, 2011
There are many people who have helped in this project. Right from the volume's inception, series editor Libby Potter was a constant source of insightful advice and moral support. Ingrid van Laarhoven at Springer was always ready to answer yet another question as soon as it was asked. A large number of anonymous reviewers were also indispensible in making this volume what it is. The introduction benefitted immensely from Phyllis Rooney's careful reading. Undergraduate research assistant Stephanie Joyce assisted with formatting and compiling at crucial moments. I especially would like to thank Lorraine Code, Carla Fehr, Phyllis Rooney, and Ilya Storm for their friendship, encouragement and help with this project. vii Contents Introduction: Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Twenty-First Century.
2022
Feminist scholars have demonstrated that scientific knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. In this course, we will therefor focus on scientific knowledge production as a social practice. Reading classic and contemporary feminist theories of science, we will explore the relationship between science, objectivity, and truth. What does it mean to emphasize the situatedness and the historically contingent and social nature of scientific knowledge? How can ‘we’ arrive at stronger versions of objectivity? How are categories of difference such as sex, gender, and race, to name but a few, informing the ways ‘we’ experience and understand the world? Engaging with these and other important questions, we will discuss how feminist epistemologies and philosophies of science have fundamentally reworked the relationship between body and mind, matter and meaning, the subject and the object of knowledge. While the first part of the seminar will deal with epistemological and theoretical foundations of feminist science studies, in the second part we will read recent contributions to feminist science studies as well as feminist new materialist interventions that aim at producing situated knowledges through critical engagements with various worldly phenomena.
Mapping the Maze of Feminist Philosophy of Science
Metascience, 2008
Given the volume and variety of work available within feminist philosophy of science, the field can easily appear a maze to new readers. This book strives to clarify the major themes and arguments that make up this maze, and succeeds by adopting a strategy of focused explanation of selected theories and arguments of leading feminist philosophers of science. I take the main audience of this book to be students of undergraduate philosophy of science courses, and perhaps philosophers of science unfamiliar with feminist philosophy of science. Feminist philosophers unfamiliar with the core issues of philosophy of science will also find the work useful. This book is different from most texts available on feminism and science in that it limits itself specifically to issues of philosophy of science, leaving out feminist work in science studies more broadly defined. Feminist critiques of particular cases of scientific research make their appearances to be sure, but only insofar as these cases and critiques serve to illuminate particular issues and positions within philosophy of science, such as how to understand the role of contextual values and background assumptions in scientific theorising, what makes particular cases of science objective or not, and whether standards of good scientific inquiry are relative to particular communities. This framework is precisely what makes the book a good choice as a text in an undergraduate philosophy of science course; used in conjunction with Ôstandard' work in philosophy of science, it serves to introduce students to the particular problems and solutions feminist philosophers of science have put forward to understand how science works and what makes it successful,
FEMINISM AND SCIENCE : What remains left?
In this paper, I will focus on the question “What kind of relation exists between feminism and science, how this relation evolves through different paradigms (namely modernism, feminism and postmodernism), and what remains left from these feminist science discussions in the twenty-first century?” In order to answer these questions, I divided my paper into three sections. In the first section, I will discuss science in modernism in order to understand from where feminist thought arises as an opposition to positivism and as a continuum of Marxist theory. In the second section, I will analyze feminist perspectives on science by applying to Sandra Harding’s categorization of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory and feminist postmodernism. In the last section, I will focus on general critiques towards these feminist perspectives, and what remains left as a result of these critiques.
Asking Different Questions: Feminist Practices for the Natural Sciences
Hypatia, 2008
In this paper, Roy attempts to develop a semiprescriptive analysis for the natural sciences by examining more closely a skill that many feminist scientists have been reported to possess. Feminist scientists have often been laudedfor their ability to "ask different questions." Drawing from standpoint theory, strong objectivity, situated knowkdges, agential realism, and the methodology of the oppressed, the author suggests that this skill can be arriculatedfurther into the feminist practice ofresearch agenda choice. Roy illustrates the usefulness of developing such a practice by addressing her own dilemma of conducting in witro research in a reproductive biology lab.