“Standpoint theory was never supposed to be a theory about identity.”

In this episode, we speak with Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Donna tells us about how deeply their thinking and activism was informed by close feminist friendships with Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock, beginning in the 1980s in the context of Marxist feminist collectives in Baltimore, and also by a lifetime of friendly, if sometimes contentious, debate with Bruno Latour.

We discuss what’s troublesome about the spatial metaphors of “standing and pointing” and why standpoints should be understood as structural, crafted and collective work objects. We also talk about what happens when standpoints “break down” because they are no longer adequate to the complexities of the world, when friends and allies find they disagree fundamentally about issues of relativism, experience, and situated knowledges, not so much theoretically but in starkly pragmatic terms, for example, in cases of sexual harassment charges and Indigenous women’s rights in Mexican contexts. There is much wisdom here about learning how to recognize when you were wrong, what we can learn from human and non-human others, and how to collectively fight for a better world.

Works discussed TBD.

Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant

Mixed by Lilith Charlet

Illustrations by Rachel Cripps

Music by The Years from the ⁠Free Music Archive⁠ licensed under an ⁠Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License⁠.

“Standpoint isn’t magic ... it’s a matter of practice.”

In this first episode we talk to Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Education, and Gender Studies (UCLA), and her daughter, Emily Harding-Morick, about the very beginnings of standpoint theory. Sandra Harding recounts how she and her long-time friend and colleague, political theorist Nancy Hartsock, started a political discussion group in the 1970s in Baltimore inspired by their Marxist and feminist commitments. Their pivotal early publications on standpoint theory arose from these discussions: Nancy’s “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism” (1983) and Sandra’s Science Question in Feminism (1986). We talk with Sandra about consciousness-raising groups in the 70s, how she “learned to think about race” in the decades that followed, and her thinking about lesbian standpoints and queer research in the 90s. She describes how she moved from theorizing to “doing” standpoint, and explains why Tapuya, the interdisciplinary journal of Latin Science, Technology and Society, is such an important intervention.

Works discussed TBD.

Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant

Mixed by Lilith Charlet

Illustrations by Rachel Cripps

Music by The Years from the Free Music Archive licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.