Next talk: 'The Promise and Challenge of Feminist Epistemology' by Billy Holzberg on Tuesday 12 June 2018

Abstract

Feminist epistemology was born out of and continues to develop in close relationship with political struggles for gender equality, emancipation and feminist liberation by contesting the exclusion of women’s intellectual labour from the halls of philosophy. In doing so, however, feminist epistemology has not only challenged exclusions of gender, race, class and sexuality in the sites of knowledge production but it has also deconstructed fundamental assumptions about the objective nature of science and philosophy. In this lecture, I will focus on three key insights that feminist epistemology has brought to philosophical debate: positionality, subjectivity and interdisciplinarity. Going through these concepts, I will elaborate on the promises and challenges of situated knowledges that take subjectivity seriously, that draw from a variety of sources, and that highlight how power relations shape the way we understand and make sense of the world.