Situated Knowledge

The term situated knowledge is most associated with feminist geographers and their critiques of the process of knowledge production. Drawing inspiration from anthropologist Donna Haraway, who commented critically on the construction of powerful scientific knowledge, feminists have challenged the truth claims of detached disembodied means of knowing the world. Haraway argued for a situated knowledge, referring to the notion that knowledge can be partial, located, and embodied; in other words, and put simply, knowledge always comes from someone somewhere. Conventionally, the Western academy has constructed the most valuable forms of knowledge as ones that are impartial and deeply authoritative because of what Haraway called the “god trick” of seeing everything from nowhere and the refusal to situate claims relative to personal, social, and geographic contexts. Whereas scientific and other “master” knowledges are founded on claims of universality created through supposed objective detachment, feminist researchers argue that situating knowledge enables more critical thinking whereby the transcendent is replaced by partial and politicized knowledge claims. Such feminist approaches must be careful, however, to guard against a romanticized adoption of “subjugated” knowledges (those traditionally denied or ignored) and to avoid relativism (the notion that all knowledges are equally valid).

Such critiques of knowledge production have influenced feminist geographic research in particular, and this has been evident in debates about research methods and power relations in the discipline. These debates in turn have influenced feminist research practice as researchers have tried to employ a range of qualitative research techniques that enable sensitive, nonexploitative, and embodied encounters with a range of actors and agents in a variety of locations. Producing situated knowledge also entails processes of reflexivity—itself a kind of “self-regard”—to avoid the god trick of the objective master gaze and locate oneself relative to others and hegemonic social discourses. However, such processes often are fraught with difficulties because it is challenging to clearly situate oneself in a world that often is conceptualized and experienced as fluid and uncertain. Hence, Haraway's account of situating knowledge challenges feminist and other researchers to destabilize taken-for-granted forms of academic authority, but without problematically “fixing” our positions in a fluid world or simplistically understanding human differences as (just) relative.