Standpoint methodology and its strong objectivity standard emerged four decades ago in the context of social justice movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Movements for poor people, African Americans, women, LGBTQ, and the disabled differed from each other in many ways. Yet, all were firmly anti- authoritarian, criticizing the top-down policies and practices of governments, international agencies, and the natural and social sciences that served the interests of such institutions. Dominated groups would continue to be oppressed by theory and public policy that ignored how the conditions of their lives differed from the life conditions of elite white men. They all insisted that the perspectives on daily life from their marginalized lives provided more justifiable standards for good research, as well as for the democratic public policies that such research was supposed to direct.
This presentation will focus on how, today, newer social movements, such as those of Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and of indigenous and colonized peoples, are demanding additional attention to the research practices that have bad effects on public policy and the everyday lives of peoples in such groups. Graduate student research has become a powerful contributor to such pro-democratic practices.
Sandra Harding is a Distinguished Research Professor Emerita of Education and Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a philosopher of science. She taught for two decades at the University of Delaware before moving to UCLA in 1996. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women 1996- 2000, and co-edited the journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2000- 2005. She was a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University 2010-2014.
In 2017 she became a founding member of the Senior Editorial Team of Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, which is an electronic, Open Access, English language journal edited in Latin America. It completed Volume 2 in December 2019. Her recent publications have been focused on Latin American science, technology and society.
In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Award by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) for distinguished contributions to the field. In 2017 she was awarded the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in Gender Studies at Cambridge University. She is the author or editor of seventeen books and special journal issues including…
She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok. She has consulted to U.N.organizations including the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO, and the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development.
Moore Hall 3039
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1521
Phone: (310) 206-0492
Email: sharding@gseis.ucla.edu
Website: https://gseis.ucla.edu/directory/sandra-harding/