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    Sciences from Below
    Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities

    Sandra Harding (Author)

    9780822342823

    Paperback / softback, published 25 June 2008

    296 pages
    23.5 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.454 kg

    “It seems that a work of this nature is long overdue and, will significantly improve the communication between modernity theorists and those working in feminist or postcolonial studies.” - Carolyn Anderson, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith
    “This is an ambitious and impressive book. . . . Harding’s book is a significant contribution to the literature on science, feminism, and postcoloniality. It is certainly a step in the direction of the transformation of science and politics that is Harding’s goal.” - Susan Hekman, Contemporary Sociology
    “Sciences from Below is a brilliant synthesis of three approaches to science and technology studies and a call for increased exchange between
    them.” - Nancy Tuana, Isis
    “[T]he philosophical-and human-imperatives that led [Harding] to write this book are extremely important, and the book itself opens possibilities that philosophers must explore.” - Emily R. Grosholz, Women’s Review of Books
    “[A] stunning synthesis of research from post-positivist, feminist, and postcolonial science studies scholars.” - Bonnie Shulman, Technology and Culture
    “Sciences from Below is a splendid book. Sandra Harding’s project of intellectual integration, bringing together some of the most influential literatures on modernity, science, and feminism, is a welcome, much-needed project. Her project is needed because the social justice movements need synthetic scholarship, and it is needed because there is an academic tower of Babel with few translators.”-Hilary Rose, author of Love, Power, and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences

    “Sandra Harding fills significant gaps in three crucial, overlapping, yet strangely independent scholarly literatures on science and technology: feminist analyses of science, “traditional” science and technology studies, and postcolonial science studies. This is a unifying and strengthening project of great significance both practically (for the future of science throughout the world) and within academe.”-Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
    “Sandra Harding’s voice is one of the most important in the science and technology studies field. With Sciences from Below, she opens up a broad vista, one in which the entire field of social movements and alternative visions of modernity is gendered.”-David J. Hess, Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Director of the Program in Ecological Economics, Values, and Policy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
    “Sciences from Below is a brilliant synthesis of three approaches to science and technology studies and a call for increased exchange between
    them.”
    - Nancy Tuana (Isis)
    “[A] stunning synthesis of research from post-positivist, feminist, and postcolonial science studies scholars.”
    - Bonnie Shulman (Technology and Culture)
    “[T]he philosophical-and human-imperatives that led [Harding] to write this book are extremely important, and the book itself opens possibilities that philosophers must explore.”
    - Emily R. Grosholz (Women's Review of Books)
    “It seems that a work of this nature is long overdue and, will significantly improve the communication between modernity theorists and those working in feminist or postcolonial studies.”
    - Carolyn Anderson (Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith)
    “This is an ambitious and impressive book. . . . Harding’s book is a significant contribution to the literature on science, feminism, and postcoloniality. It is certainly a step in the direction of the transformation of science and politics that is Harding’s goal.”
    - Susan Hekman (Contemporary Sociology)

    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.

    Acknowledgments vii
    Introduction: Why Focus on Modernity? 1
    I. Problems with Modernity's Science and Politics: Perspectives from Northern Science Studies
    1. Modernity's Misleading Dream: Latour 23
    2. The Incomplete First Modernity of Industrial Society: Beck 49
    3. Co-evoloving Science and Society: Gibbons, Nowotny, and Scott 75
    II. Views from (Western) Modernity's Peripheries
    4. Women as Subjects of History and Knowledge 101
    5. Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies: Are There Multiple Sciences? 130
    6. Women on Modernity's Horizons: Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies 155
    III. Interrogating Tradition: Challenges and Possibilities
    7. Multiple Modernities: Postcolonial Standpoints 173
    8. Haunted Modernities, Gendered Traditions 191
    9. Moving On: A Methodological Provocation 214
    Notes 235
    Bibliography 257
    Index 281
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