• Autour de la #positionnalité

    My positionality, your positionality, whose positionality? WTF is...POSITIONALITY!? Positionality is a feminist epistemological principle that holds that our social locations shape our experience and knowledge of the world. Read on for more!

    “This stance holds that our positions in relation to various social structures necessarily inform the knowledge we produce about our shared worlds. Positionalities are not static, nor are they total” - they emerge situationally & relationally (qted from https://bit.ly/3dkUesE).

    This means that when we make claims to know something, we have to think about from what location do we know. That location will shape how we perceive and experience the world, and even if we perceive certain aspects of the world (e.g. racism).

    Feminists point out that so much of “Western” knowledge and theory has issued from the viewpoint of a detached white male perspective. Yet we do not situate it as such. White male viewpoints are seen as somehow universal and transhistorical (what Haraway calls the “god trick”).

    So anytime we are making claims to know, we have to situate those claims in our embodied subjectivities and their historical legacies. How does my gendered/racial/any privilege shape what I am seeing? What am I not perceiving due to my location in a social structure?

    Patricia Hill Collins, who developed standpoint epistemology (a closely connected idea), argued that Black women can contribute to sociological knowledge because their status as “outsiders” allows them to see things others don’t see about the functioning of society.

    Standpoint and other feminist epistemologies hold that some locations are better than others for forming knowledge abt privilege, oppression, and power. Those on the margins of dominant social orders can better “see” the operations of power & privilege bc it shapes their reality.

    “Positionality is a critical tool to call into question the production & institutionalization of dominant knowledge, enabling us to articulate the epistem. & political value in our accounts of the world & claim our exp. as a source of critical knowledge”

    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369X.2021.2020733?journalCode=cgpc20

    Hope that helps! Positionality shapes everything - what we perceive, what we recognize as knowledge, how we theorize the world to be. Yet in geog, we’re still trying to convince white guys that they have epistemological locations (on this issue: https://bit.ly/3EAQJHN).

    https://twitter.com/WTFisGeography/status/1570407408312397829
    #positionnalité #recherche

    ping @karine4 @cede