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Mary E. Swigonski - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The Logic of Feminist Standpoint Theory for Social Work Research
Social Work, 1994Co-Authors: Mary E. SwigonskiAbstract:The dialectic of relevance and rigor symbolizes the tension between social work practitioners and researchers. Social work practitioners want professional research to be relevant, to contribute to the understanding of human behavior in the social environment, and to improve practice effectiveness. Social work researchers want professional research to be rigorous and to meet the highest standards of science. And, of course, some social workers want both. Yet definitions of "good science" seem to preclude that possibility. During the first half of this century, social work embraced psychoanalysis and the scientific method of the natural sciences in an effort to achieve professional status and credibility. Social work research methods were adopted from the social and natural sciences. For many social workers, the predominant paradigm in the definition of knowledge building and research is descended from the logical positivism of the beginning of the 20th century (Wood, 1990). The positivist philosophy and its approach to scientific activity rest on several key philosophical assumptions. Three in particular are problematic for social work: (1) the claim of value-free scientific activity, (2) the requirement of subject-object separation, and (3) definitions of scientific objectivity. It is time that social work enact a commitment to the development of an epistemology and research consonant with its unique professional character. This article presents feminist Standpoint Theory as an alternative epistemology for social work practice and research. Feminist Standpoint Theory provides a vehicle to move social work research and practice toward a synthesis of relevance and rigor. This Theory provides an alternative approach to knowledge justification and "good science" and leads to a resolution of the seeming contradiction between the need for relevance and the commitment to rigor in professional practice and research. The following discussion builds on the work of social scientists Mary McCanney Gergen (1988), Kenneth J. Gergen (1988), Sandra Harding (1987, 1991), and Joyce McCarl Nielsen (1990). Beliefs and Conflicts Value-Free Scientific Activity Logical positivism asserts the possibility of value-free Theory and science based on the use of the senses and reason. Knowledge for knowledge's sake is believed to be both desirable and possible. But in the 1960s, critics of science discovered that those in charge of the neutral sciences were overwhelmingly white, male, and privileged occupants of positions in advanced industrialized society (Rose, 1983). The sciences are inextricably part of the social order that supports them. Hubbard (1988) called our attention to the political, value-laden nature of scientific activity in her assertion that "the pretense that science is apolitical and value neutral is profoundly political because it obscures the political role that science and technology play in underwriting the existing distribution of power in society. . . . Science and technology always operate in somebody's interest". In societies where power is organized hierarchically (by class, culture, or gender), there is no possibility of an impartial, disinterested, value-neutral perspective. Social work's commitment to value-directed actions stands in contrast to positivist commitments to value-free endeavors. A profession that prides itself on a humanitarian value base cannot rely on a research grounded in the assertion that its methods can and should strip values from its work and findings. From its inception, social work research has been an applied research. The profession's commitment to practical ends requires that social work researchers possess an acute awareness of the value-laden potentials of the process and products of our science. Social work practitioners more readily become involved with research activities that honor the profession's commitment to client empowerment and social transformation. …
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Feminist Standpoint Theory and the Questions of Social Work Research
Affilia, 1993Co-Authors: Mary E. SwigonskiAbstract:This article presents feminist Standpoint Theory as an alternative epistemology for social work research—an alternative Theory of what makes knowledge possible and how to get it—and discusses the o...
Paige L. Sweet - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Who Knows? Reflexivity in Feminist Standpoint Theory and Bourdieu:
Gender & Society, 2020Co-Authors: Paige L. SweetAbstract:Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjec...
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The Feminist Question in Realism
Sociological Theory, 2018Co-Authors: Paige L. SweetAbstract:Feminist Standpoint Theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse...
Sandra Harding - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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A Socially Relevant Philosophy of Science? Resources from Standpoint Theory's Controversiality
Hypatia, 2004Co-Authors: Sandra HardingAbstract:Feminist Standpoint Theory remains highly controversial: it is widely advocated, used to guide research and justify its results, and yet is also vigorously denounced. This essay argues that three such sites of controversy reveal the value of engaging with Standpoint Theory as a way of reflecting on and debating some of the most anxiety-producing issues in contemporary Western intellectual and political life. Engaging with Standpoint Theory enables a socially relevant philosophy of science.
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Comment on Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited": Whose Standpoint Needs the Regimes of Truth and Reality?
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1997Co-Authors: Sandra HardingAbstract:I AGREE WITH SEVERAL of Susan Hekman's central arguments (in this issue). Feminist Standpoint Theory has indeed made a major contribution to feminist Theory and, as she indicates at the end, to late twentieth-century efforts to develop more useful ways of thinking about the production of knowledge in local and global political economies. We can note that feminists are not the only contemporary social theorists to struggle with projects of extricating ourselves from some of the constraints of those philosophies of modernity that began to emerge in Europe three or more centuries ago. Moreover, Hekman is certainly right that current reevaluations of marxian projects, of the "difference" issues, and of poststructuralism are three sites of both resources and challenges to the further development of Standpoint theories, as they must be also for other contemporary social theorizing. These last three sets of issues are intimately related. The modern understanding of how to go about knowledge seeking, retained in the marxian epistemology, assumed that one should imagine a kind of single, ideal knower, "homogeneously" constituted since he purportedly represented no particular cultural identity, interests, or discourses. The proletarian Standpoint, once it was generalized as the truly human Standpoint, provided just such an ideal unitary knower no less than did social contract Theory's "rational man." Issues neither of differences between knowers nor of the cultural constitution of knowledge-the multicultural and poststructuralist issue about discourses-could arise as long as knowledge acquisition was figured as performing the "God-trick," as Donna Haraway famously put the point (1988). Thus, early articulations of feminist Standpoint Theory retained some of these problematic modernist assumptions about truth and reality. However, it seems to me that Hekman distorts the central project of Standpoint theorists when she characterizes it as one of figuring out how to justify the truth of feminist claims to more accurate accounts of reality. Rather, it is relations between power and knowledge that concern these thinkers. They have wanted to identify ways that male supremacy and the production of knowledge have coconstituted each other in the past and
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Truth and method : Feminist Standpoint Theory revisited. Comments and author's reply
Signs, 1997Co-Authors: S. Hekman, Sandra Harding, N. C. M. Hartsock, P. H. Collins, D. E. SmithAbstract:S. Hekman examine de facon critique l'ouvrage de N. C. M. Hartsock intitule «Money, sexe, and power» publie en 1983. Elle montre de quelle maniere Hatsock envisage le point de vue feministe. Elle souligne que ce point de vue doit etre redefini notamment sur le plan epistemologique. Hekman analyse le lien entre verite et methode. Elle propose un nouveau paradigme en matiere d'epistemologie feministe. Hartsock repond a Hekman et critique sa conception de la subjectivite. Hartsock souligne l'importance de la theorie marxiste pour l'analyse feministe
Brenda J. Allen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Feminist Standpoint Theory: A black woman's (re)view of organizational socialization
Communication Studies, 1996Co-Authors: Brenda J. AllenAbstract:Despite numerous appeals for organizational communication scholars to incorporate feminist theorizing into their work, few researchers have done so. In this essay, feminist Standpoint Theory is applied to an analysis of organizational socialization, an inherently communicative phenomenon. Speaking from her vantage point as an African‐American faculty member at a predominantly White, research university, the author recounts excerpts from her lived experiences to demonstrate the value of eliciting insight from an “outsider within.” She concludes with implications for practice and research.
Mark P. Orbe - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Situating Oneself in a Racialized World: Understanding Student Reactions to Crash through Standpoint Theory and Context-Positionality Frames
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 2008Co-Authors: Etsuko Kinefuchi, Mark P. OrbeAbstract:Abstract Through a thematic analysis of 136 student reactions to the movie Crash, this study examines how individuals situate themselves in terms of race, racism, and race relations in the film and how their racial locations inform this situatedness. We utilize principles of Standpoint theories as the theoretical framework for the analysis. We first describe this situatedness in terms of six emergent genres of responses that varied across positionality and contextual focus. Then, we discuss how the patterns of responses may be explained through Standpoint theories and conversely how the emergent organizing framework may complement Standpoint theories.
