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ABSTRACT.
Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges and then uses this notion to trouble the legitimacy of employing Kantian-inspired prepositional rationalism to justify all knowledge claims. Lang challenges the notions of the discrete, objective, impartial, interchangeable subject and the static passivity of objects of knowing. He demonstrates the inevitable involvement of the subjective in knowledge construction and justification; he claims that knowledge is necessarily embodied, partial, and situated and, further, that its construction, claiming, and enacting are activities with moral and political ramifications. Finally, Lang shows that re-visioning contexts of education through lenses of epistemologies of situated knowledges reveals a vastly expanded moral landscape with significant implications for educators, students, and educational theorists.
OVERVIEW
Reading work grounded in feminist epistemologies through the lens of mainstream philosophy can be difficult for mainstream philosophers. After all, as John Dewey said nine decades ago, "when women, who are not mere students of other persons' philosophy set out to write it, we cannot conceive that it will be the same viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the different masculine experience of things."1 To mainstream eyes, feminist work does indeed bring a different viewpoint, one that seems to require multiple entry points for different readers to allow engagement. For example, Maureen Ford's article "Situating Knowledges as Coalition Work," published previously in Educational Theory as part of a symposium on feminist theory in philosophy of education, may well serve as an excellent starting point for some readers who are unfamiliar with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges, as the symposium's editors, Barbara Thayer-Bacon and Gayle Turner, suggest.2 But Ford failed to engage Dennis Cato, for one, according to his response to her article, which he pronounced "incoherent."3 Therefore, I offer another starting point to feminist epistemologies of situated knowledges taken from my own masculine perspective and set in the context of works by Immanuel Kant and Lorraine Code, both of whom are perhaps more accessible to mainstream philosophers. Eventually, contrary to the opinion...