Nancy Tuana

“Epistemologies of ignorance have always been a part of standpoint theory.” In this episode we talk with Nancy Tuana who holds the DuPont/Class of 1949 Professorship in Philosophy and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. We learn how important the Science for the People movement and epistemologies of ignorance were, not only for her own engagement with standpoint theory, but also for the development of standpoint theory generally. Tuana argues that epistemologies of ignorance have always been central to standpoint theory. Through her involvement in the women’s health movement, she learned how vital it is to understand what we know and what we don’t know, why certain knowledge is discounted or occluded and who benefits from this. In the context of her work on climate crisis, she cautions against a desire for certainty and easy answers, especially when this obscures complexity and displaces hard questions about what we value and what informs actions. In order to work towards a more just world what we need, she argues, is to understand long-term, global genealogies of oppressive dynamics. We talk with her about her roots in political organising with Science for the People, the women’s health movement, teach-ins, and consciousness-raising, as well as what it meant to take on the challenges of activism within academia, advocating for feminist scholarship as an editor of Hypatia. In her most recent work on climate science, Tuana foregrounds Indigenous science and collaborative research practices. One of the through lines of this interview is that ethical and political considerations in research from the margins cannot be an afterthought; politics and ethics must be at the heart of co-producing science. Visit us at ⁠https://standpointtheory.com/references/⁠ for a reference list of works discussed in this episode. Edited by Karoline Paier Mixed by Andy Niles Illustrations by Rachel CrippsMusic by The Years from the ⁠⁠Free Music Archive⁠⁠ licensed under an ⁠⁠Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License⁠⁠.

“I like everything about standpoint – except the ‘standing’ and the ‘pointing.’” In this episode, we speak with Linda Martín Alcoff, professor of philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). As a PhD student working in epistemology, right at the time when Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock published their first articles on standpoint theory, Linda was immediately drawn to these emerging feminist and socialist theories. Standpoint theorizing for Linda has always been deeply connected to her political work: she explains how her 1970s civil rights and anti-war activism has influenced her work and why, for her, identity politics has never been formulaic, or opposed to her Marxist views. In this context, she tells us about her close friendship with Charles Mills and how their political genealogies–rooted in Panama and Jamaica–shaped their philosophical thinking. We also discuss why ‘standpoints’ are a better conceptual tool than “women’s ways of knowing” and what remains troublesome about the individualist notion of “standing and pointing”; and why it’s vitally important to look beyond our disciplinary silos and to rebuild the threads of connection to earlier generations of standpoint theorists and political movements. Visit us at ⁠https://standpointtheory.com/references/⁠ for a reference list of works discussed in this episode. Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant Mixed by Lilith Charlet Illustrations by Rachel CrippsMusic by The Years from the ⁠⁠Free Music Archive⁠⁠ licensed under an ⁠⁠Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License⁠⁠.

“Standpoint theory was never supposed to be a theory about identity.” In this episode, we speak with Donna Haraway, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. Donna tells us about how deeply their thinking and activism was informed by close feminist friendships with Sandra Harding and Nancy Hartsock, beginning in the 1980s in the context of Marxist feminist collectives in Baltimore, and also by a lifetime of friendly, if sometimes contentious, debate with Bruno Latour. We discuss what’s troublesome about the spatial metaphors of “standing and pointing” and why standpoints should be understood as dynamic, crafted and collective work objects. We also talk about what happens when standpoints are no longer adequate to the complexities of the world, and how to navigate situations where friends and allies find they disagree fundamentally, not so much theoretically but in starkly pragmatic terms. There is much wisdom here about learning how to recognize when you are wrong, what we can learn from human and more-than-human others, and how to collectively fight for a better world.Visit us at https://standpointtheory.com/references/ for a reference list of works discussed in this episode. Annotated transcripts with further context and reference information is also available at https://standpointtheory.com/transcripts/Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant Mixed by Lilith Charlet Illustrations by Rachel CrippsMusic by The Years from the ⁠Free Music Archive⁠ licensed under an ⁠Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License⁠.

“Standpoint isn’t magic ... it’s a matter of practice.” In this first episode we talk to Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Education, and Gender Studies (UCLA), and her daughter, Emily Harding-Morick, about the very beginnings of standpoint theory. Sandra Harding recounts how she and her long-time friend and colleague, political theorist Nancy Hartsock, started a political discussion group in the 1970s in Baltimore inspired by their Marxist and feminist commitments. Their pivotal early publications on standpoint theory arose from these discussions including, for example, Nancy’s “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism” (1983) and Sandra’s Science Question in Feminism (1986). We talk with Sandra about consciousness-raising groups in the 70s, how she “learned to think about race” in the decades that followed, and her thinking about lesbian standpoints and queer research in the 90s. She describes how she moved from "theorizing to doing” standpoint, and explains why Tapuya, the interdisciplinary journal of Latin Science, Technology and Society, is such an important intervention.Visit us at ⁠https://standpointtheory.com/references/⁠ for a reference list of works discussed in this episode. Annotated transcripts with further context and reference information is also available at ⁠https://standpointtheory.com/transcripts/⁠Edited by Karoline Paier, Alex Bryant Mixed by Lilith Charlet Illustrations by Rachel CrippsMusic by The Years from the Free Music Archive licensed under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.