LEAD Center’s Kate McCleary on Feminist Epistemologies

June 21, 2016

A blog post in AEA365 features Kate S. McCleary's five central themes on feminist epistemologies. 

From the post:

Lessons Learned: For me, feminist epistemologies focus on…

  1. Women’s lives and the oppression of women and other marginalized groups: Feminist epistemologies explore difference and seek to know and understand the lived experience of those whose voices/experiences have been marginalized. Chandra T. Mohanty’s book Feminism Without Bordersexplores the plurality of contemporary, global feminism.
  2. Power, authority, and hierarchy: Feminist epistemologies seek to “decenter the center.” This is the title of Uma Narayan and Susan Harding’s book that explores the way feminism is enacted across borders, and in multicultural and postcolonial contexts.
  3. Relationships: The relationship that individuals have within their homes, communities, broader society, and the world hold meaning. Carol Hanisch’s (1969) claim that “the personal is political” holds true today.
  4. Facts and findings are all “value tinged”: Knowledge and knowing is socially situated; thus no one is ever able to get rid of one’s own values.
  5. Understanding the lived, quotidian experiences of women and other individuals: In 1987, Dorothy Smith wrote a book The Everyday World As Problematic that called on researchers to be attentive to the full spectrum of what constitutes women’s, and other groups, lives.

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