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Abbott-Haskin Endowed Lectureship

Sandra Harding Lecture 2019.jpgWith the gracious funding of the Abbott-Haskin Endowment, GenCen is able to host a biennial lectureship series. Our inaugural speaker will be Dr. Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor from UCLA who has done groundbreaking work in feminist philosophy.

Join us Wednesday, February 6, 2019 from 3:00-5:00p.m. in Room 303 of the International Center for Dr. Harding's Lecture, entitled "Deep Scientific Pluralism: A Latin American Feminist Standpoint."

Co-sponsors: Center for Interdisciplinarity; Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Dept. of Anthropology; Dept. of Community Sustainability; Dept. of Philosophy; Dept. of Sociology; Lyman Briggs College; Science + Society @ State (S3)

Dr. Sandra Harding - "Deep Scientific Pluralism: A Latin American Feminist Standpoint"

SandraHarding.jpgThe recent “ontological turn” in anthropology has challenged familiar phillosophic assumptions that we all live in the same world, in the same reality, that is “out there” ready to be most accurately represented by modern, scientific thought.  Different cultures may have different perspectives on that reality, but some are more accurate than others. Such philosophic assumptions are widely assumed not only by the natural sciences, but also by much of the social sciences.   Instead, the new approach to cultural differences insists that the world consists of multiple “reals,” and the merely epistemological approach to such differences characteristic of the familiar modern, scientific position, has been and remains not only based on a delusion, but crucial to colonialism. Feminists have long presented this argument, focusing on the oppression of women in all global contexts, rather than only on colonialism.

So how should maximally desirable communication across such ontological differences occur?  Here I focus on one practical project that attempts to bridge across such a colonial gap, and on the necessity not only to bring to  visibility, but to retain as fully visible certain kinds of ontological and epistemic incoherences upon which the success of such a project turns out to depend.  This project has been the founding of  the new journal: Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society.  Here I have found myself having to learn to be willing to betray a number of my central professional commitments and personal, supposedly progressive, moral commitments in order to retain the full collaboration that the  project demands. As indicated,  feminist theory has been aware of this challenge for decades, though it has not articulated it in exactly this form. I take this presentation to be providing an example of the challenges of truly collaborative work that feminist philosophers such as Alison Wylie have theorized.

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