===
ON AUTHORITY AND COMMITMENTS: SIMULTANEOUS FORMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (Star 1995: 22):
Star, S.L., ed. 1995. Ecologies of Knowledge: Work and politics in science and technology. SUNY.
"We honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any others. But I do at the same time argue with and try to overthrow those I don't agree with! Relativism in this sense does not imply neutrality--rather, it implies forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority. This is quite different from abandoning moral commitments.”
EPISTEMOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR? GOD'S EYE VIEW?
VIEWS AS THE VERY INSIDE/S (STIGMERGY?)
ON THE PRIVILEGE OF PARTIAL PERSPECTIVE (Haraway 1988 & 1991):
Haraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 183-201. New York: Routledge, 1991 [Originally published in Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988): 575-599].
187: "We also don't want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different--and power-differentiated--communities."
190: "These are lessons which I learned in part walking with my dogs and wondering how the world looks without a fovea and very few retinal cells for colour vision, but with a huge neural processing and sensory area for smells."
192: "A commitment to mobile positioning and to passionate detachment is dependent on the impossibility of innocent 'identity' politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated in order to see well. One cannot 'be' either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, labourer, and so on--if one intends to see and see from these positions critically. 'Being' is much more problematic and contingent....We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology linking meanings and bodies."
image credit: https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1105/4730529360_0cb482905d_z.jpg
===
queering infrastructure, generations,
(inter)interdisciplines
Katie King,
Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / katking@umd.edu
Contributions
from Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, LGBT Studies
1.
adding
feminist technoscience languages: Susan Leigh Star & Lucy Suchman
2.
queering the
infrastructure: Star
3.
elements of infrastructure: 5 prongs of our
interdisciplinary studies
4.
circumstances of
communication Suchman
5.
communities of practice: communications among
political generations, (inter)interdisciplinarities
queering the infrastructure:
notes on Star's
talk: "to queer: to challenge the
basis on which categories are constructed. (reverses the usual use of
categories to enforce behavior)... queering - associated with specific
constituencies, willingness to send something up... any kind of category can be
open to questions regarding whose category it is, who defines it." Note
LGBT Studies: Gay sent up by Lesbian, both sent up by Bisexual, all sent up by
Transgendered.
5 pronged infrastructure of our interdisciplinary
studies:
·
administrative
activism and innovation local, state, national, transnational
·
curricular
alliances and reframings from department to (inter)interdisciplines
·
scholarly
research, theoretical conceptualizations in international and interdisciplinary
travel
·
new social
movements in generational microcohorts, in layers of locals and globals
·
new technological
infrastructures and their globalizing promises and terrors
all in intersection: the very
instability of identities as resource: coming into being, altering, dissolving,
morphing; thus identity politics in continual reconstruction: critical,
self-valorizing, negating, abandonment; eg. "Gay" and "Queer"
in their instabilities; "American" in its instabilities. See Sturgeon
on direct theory. See Hennessy on foundational
terminology and its transnational political uses.
circumstances of communication (think across
movements, interdisciplines, generations):
Suchman: "... an
increasingly dense and differentiated layering of people and activities, each
operating within a limited sphere of knowing and acting that includes variously
crude or sophisticated conceptualizations of the others.”
“Gradually, however, we came
to see that the problem lay neither in ourselves nor in our colleagues, but in
the division of professional labor and the assumptions about knowledge
production that lay behind it.....What we were learning was inextricably tied
to the ongoing development of our own theorizing and practice, such that it
could not be cut loose and exported elsewhere."
“In place of the model of
knowledge as a product that can be assembled through hand-offs in some neutral
or universal language, we began to argue the need for mutual learning and
partial translations. This in turn required new working relations not then in
place.”
communities of practice:
Bowker &
Star: "A community of practice (or
social world) is a unit of analysis that cuts across formal organizations,
institutions like family and church, and other forms of association such as
social movements."
differential consciousness: think movement across
communities of practice:
See Sandoval's
"differential consciousness": "enough strength to confidently
commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month,
year; enough flexibility to self-consciously transform that identity according
to the requisites of another oppositional tactic if readings of power's
formation require it; enough grace to recognize alliance with others committed
to egalitarian social relations and race, gender, sex, class, and social
justice, when their readings of power call for alternative oppositional
stands."
entry into
activism: Whittier's political generations in micro-cohorts:
Whittier's model
challenges age-stratification or stage in life cycle as definitions of
generations, rather initial politicization during the same era define
generations, which are internally volatile and divergent in micro-cohorts. Two
large feminist generations: the Second Wave and the Third Wave. Second Wave separated
also into micro-cohorts: initiators
(1969-1971); founders (1972-1973); joiners (1974-1978); sustainers (1979-1984) [years refer to
study in Columbus OH].
add micro-cohorts: multiple identities
working in multiple social movements:
Extending
Whittier's model to conceive of other micro-cohorts: for example, those with
multiple identities working in multiple social movements, with different social
& historical time lines: eg. various women of color, or queer activists.
Cf. Sandoval's "differential consciousness."
add micro-cohorts: activist ages of
different disciplines & interdisciplines:
Extending
Whittier's model to conceive of different disciplines and interdisciplines
politicized by <ethnic studies, women's studies, LGBT studies...> at
different time periods and to varying degrees in particular institutions and
departments and by diverse cohorts of <people of color, feminists,
queers...> with a range of activist histories, generations and visions. In
other words, some fields may have different "activist ages" than
others, and some fields may be dominated by different political generations and
cohorts than others.
queer as a generational politics:
in a politics of
refusal Queer may be used in a limiting move, rejecting whole systems of
political alliance and academic and political literatures, as a way of
processing overwhelming weights of materials, inheritances, generational
subjections, and illegitimate uses of generational and geopolitical power.
Critiques of the term Queer might practice their own generational politics,
constructing a self-valorizing history of political movement now misunderstood,
rejecting as inaccurate and inadequate the political assumptions about the
powers and resources of women's studies, feminism and women's movements, gay and
lesbian studies and movements, as too various to be unilaterally rejected.
Queer may create alliances across generations by virtue of its very
instabilities.
recognizing boundary objects when we see
them:
Bowker & Star:
"Boundary objects are those objects that both inhabit several communities
of practice and satisfy the informational requirements of each of
them....plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints...yet robust
enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured
in common use and become strongly structured in individual-site use. These
objects may be abstract or concrete....The creation and management of boundary
objects is a key process in developing and maintaining coherence across
intersecting communities....arise over time from durable cooperation among
communities of practice... "
Some materials referred to:
·
Susan Leigh Star,
"The Politics Question in Feminist Science and Technology Projects: the
queering of infrastructure." Talk from the "Technology and Democracy
– Comparative Perspectives" Conference, University of Oslo, Norway,
January 18, 1997. Notes of talk were online at: http://www.drury.edu/faculty/Ess/Technology/starr.htm
(accessed 22 June 2000).
·
Suchman,
Lucy. 2000. “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production” (draft).
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University UK was at:
http://www.comp.lancaster.ac.uk/sociology/soc039ls.html (accessed 22 June
2000).
·
Geoffrey Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting
Things Out: classification and its consequences. MIT.
· Noel Sturgeon. 1995. "Theorizing
Movements: Direct Action and Direct Theory" in Cultural Politics and Social Movements (eds. Marcy Darnovsky,
Barbara Epstein and Richard Flacks). Temple.
·
Nancy Whittier.
1995. Feminist Generations: the
persistence of the radical women's movement. Temple.
· Rosemary Hennessy. 2000. Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in
Late Capitalism. Routledge.
·
Chela Sandoval.
2000. Methology of the Oppressed. U.
Minnesota.
· Katie King. 2000. "Productive
Agencies of Feminist Theory: the work it does." Feminist
Theory 2/1 (2001): 94-98.
·
Katie King.
"Interdisciplinarity, Generations, Languages in Women's Studies: Sites of
Struggle in Layers of Globals and Locals." ms. in preparation. Working paper online HERE.
===
