
A “privilege of the partial perspective”?
On feminist epistemologies and “area studies”
October 10, 2025, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Aubervilliers
The workshop will be held in English and French. Submissions should include a 500word abstract as well as a short bio, in English or French, to be emailed to the following three members of the organizing team before June 30, 2025:
Dimitra Douskos: dimitra.douskos@wanadoo.fr
Lucie Drechselová: lucie.drechselova@ehess.fr
Camila Pastor: camila.pastor@cide.edu
The authors of selected submissions will be notified before mid-July. Limited funds are available to support travel to participate in the workshop in particular for early career scholars.
Donna Haraway’s essay on “the science question in feminism” became a reference as soon as it was published, in 1988, through its call to dislodge a supposedly disembodied and omniscient epistemic viewpoint, a patriarchal “God’s trick”, ideally set above contingencies and capable of seeing through materialities. It argued for replacing this paradigm “tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy” by something different than its relativist flip side, the erstwhile discourse
theories: a necessarily corporeal and thereby positioned, one-sided and partial “feminist objectivity”, one that leaves purportedly universal or relativist science behind to the benefit of the advent of “situated knowledges”. Such knowledges would be revolutionary, insofar as they might at last challenge the long incontestable masculine
monopoly on science.
A travelling concept par excellence, a notion that can leave much of its body, its soul, or both of them behind without entirely dissolving in the hands of other disciplines, temporalities, geographies and power differentials, the term “situated knowledges” did noticeably well, in contexts strongly marked by feminism. Or less so. In this workshop,
we set out to explore its numerous and diverse “contact zones” with other scholarly worlds also engaged in the epistemic challenges of producing “situated knowledges”.
Nearly forty years after the publication of this essay, we wonder whether there is any sort of common ground between “the privilege of partial perspective” and the paradigm of so called “area studies”. Do the latter’s aspirations to spatial neutralisation elide the feminist concerns with finitude, corporeality, situated difference, and inequity at the
heart of the concept’s formulation? Or do they hold their own, stand their ground, find a place? How do scholars working on the geographical, sexual or gendered margins see it?
For the 2025 workshop of the EHESS Interdisciplinary Research Program Social
Sciences and the World, we invite a collective discussion on questions such as:
1. Situated knowledges as an epistemological tool: usage, scope, limits
The concept of situated knowledges deeply marked western feminist
epistemologies, but does it have a history in area studies debates? What do scholars with research defined by a geographical location other than Euro-American « centers » and for whom gender constitutes a fundamental category of analysis think of the encounter of a militant concept and a long-established problematic category? Do they notice it? Are situated knowledges explicitly mobilized and what epistemological reconfigurations do they undergo and/or imply in different contexts?
2. Circulation of concepts: translating for the South, from the South?
Concepts need mediation to circulate, and their contours are shaped by
linguistic and theoretical translations – too often into or from English in north Atlantic academic circuits. Which languages and concepts emerge when one “South” looks at another “South”, de-centering earlier legitimating circuits and the cardinal role of the English language? Which are the intended and actual audiences and routes of circulation of such knowledges? Do they find their way into research agendas privileging inter-areal formations, such as transregional studies, connected histories or mobility studies?
3. “Situated” feminist approaches and epistemic injustice
When trying to think over epistemic parallels and gaps between area studies and situated knowledges one cannot help wondering whether partial perspective is a privilege, as Donna Haraway claimed, or perhaps also still a form of confinement. How do researchers bridge the gap between the extraterritoriality of their institutional affiliation and their field location? How does it shape the understanding of their work by their academic and lay publics, and the subjects discussed and represented by research? Is it really different from Haraway’s “God’s trick” and is there an institutional career impact of the situated position?
4. Feminist studies, secularisms and religious contexts
How does feminist research on confessional contexts and practices successfully engage (or not) with a concept with a significant secular
genealogy? Noted publications show that there is room for feminist scholarship in clusters that bring together in their questioning the compatibility of spirituality, religious normativity and secular analytic frameworks. But how do feminist concepts and science-making travel within such lay-and-religious assemblages? Which strategies do scholars mobilize to achieve this?
5. Fictions, arts and the production of situated knowledges
Works of fiction – visual, literary or performative – can extend, displace or contest the production of scholarly knowledge. When does artistic/fictional production “complete” the blind spots of scientific discourse? Can one consider such work as forms of situated knowledges in their own right?