Overview

In Sciences from Below, the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as three main contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects and research to overcome limiting ideas about what constitutes modernity and modernization, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. Harding also shows how each of these fields can inform and expand the others. As she has done before, in Sciences from Below, Sandra Harding points the way forward.Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they each provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity and tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge. Yet for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. Sciences from Below is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive research and policy.

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Reviews

Sciences from Below is a splendid book. Sandra Harding's project of intellectual integration, bringing together some of the most influential literatures on modernity, science, and feminism is a welcome, much needed project. Her project is needed because the social justice movements need synthetic scholarship, and it is needed because there is an academic tower of Babel with few translators. Hilary Rose, author of Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences Sandra Harding's voice is one of the most important in the science and technology studies field. With Sciences from Below, she opens up a broad vista, one in which the entire field of social movements and alternative visions of modernity is gendered. David J. Hess, Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Director of the Program in Ecological Economics, Values, and Policy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Sandra Harding fills significant gaps in three crucial, overlapping, yet strangely independent scholarly literatures on science and technology: feminist analyses of science, traditional science and technology studies, and postcolonial science studies. This is a unifying and strengthening project of great significance both practically (for the future of science throughout the world) and within academe. Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality

"""Sciences from Below is a splendid book. Sandra Harding's project of intellectual integration, bringing together some of the most influential literatures on modernity, science, and feminism is a welcome, much needed project. Her project is needed because the social justice movements need synthetic scholarship, and it is needed because there is an academic tower of Babel with few translators."" Hilary Rose, author of Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences ""Sandra Harding's voice is one of the most important in the science and technology studies field. With Sciences from Below, she opens up a broad vista, one in which the entire field of social movements and alternative visions of modernity is gendered."" David J. Hess, Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Director of the Program in Ecological Economics, Values, and Policy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ""Sandra Harding fills significant gaps in three crucial, overlapping, yet strangely independent scholarly literatures on science and technology: feminist analyses of science, ""traditional"" science and technology studies, and postcolonial science studies. This is a unifying and strengthening project of great significance both practically (for the future of science throughout the world) and within academe."" Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality"

Author Information

Sandra Harding is Professor of Women’s Studies and Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her many books include Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues; The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies; Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology (coedited with Robert Figueroa); Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies; and Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives.

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