Sciences from below
Subtitle: feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities
By: Sandra Harding.
Series: Next wave: New directions in women's studies
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Durham
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
ISBN-13: 9780822342595; 9780822342823
Subjects: Science -- Social aspects; Science -- Philosophy; Technology -- Philosophy; Philosophy -- History; Civilization, Modern; Women in science; Feminist theory
Description: "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 more productively linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as the major 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 refine their thinking to overcome limiting ideas about what modernity and modernization are, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. She also reveals how ideas about gender and colonialism frame the conventional contrast between modernity and tradition. As she has done before, Harding points the way forward in Sciences from Below.^

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 provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity versus 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 scientific research and policy."--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Why focus on modernity?; title: Problems with modernity's science and politics; title: Modernity's misleading dream; title: The incomplete first modernity of industrial society; title: Co-evolving science and society; title: Views from (Western) modernity's peripheries; title: Women as subjects of history and knowledge; title: Postcolonial science and technology studies; title: Women on modernity's horizons; title: Interrogating tradition; title: Multiple modernities; title: Haunted modernities, gendered traditions; title: Moving on.