Recent standpoints on decoloniality

Ir/Relevance of Race seminar/ARC-GS Lecture

Lecture

Sandra Harding, Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA , will focus on Latin American decoloniality standpoints and what they can tell us not only about coloniality and anti-coloniality in Latin America, but also about European modernity and its sciences and technologies.

Social justice movements, such as feminism, anti-racism, and postcolonialism, have produced a standpoint methodology that is more competent to maximize objectivity than the conventional requirement that natural and social science research be value-free.

The need for 'strong objectivity' arises when research communities lack diversity and are isolated from democratic social tendencies. Research that starts off questioning nature and social relations from the daily lives of economically and politically vulnerable groups can increase its own reliability and predictive power. Such research insists on the conventional goals of fairness to the data and to its severest criticisms. It retains central commitments of the conventional notion of objectivity while escaping its limitations.

About the lecturer

Sandra Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She taught for two decades at the University of Delaware before moving to the University of California, Los Angeles in 1996. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University.

Organisers

The lecture is organised by the Health, Care and Body research group of AISSR and the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality Studies (ARC-GS).

Registration

The lecture is free and open to the public. Registration is not required. 

About the Seminar Series

In this seminar series the relevance and irrelevance of race is being discussed as an object and concept of research in order to explore ways to talk about race without naturalizing differences. The series goes beyond a standard definition of race, one that is allegedly relevant everywhere, and situates race in specific practices of research. In addition the series gives room to the various different versions of race that can be found in the European context and explores when and how populations, religions, and cultures become naturalized and racialized. Scholars from different (inter)disciplinary fields (such as genetics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, history, political sciences, science and technology studies) are invited to address the issue of race through a paper presentation. The seminar is held every six weeks at the University of Amsterdam. Webpage Seminar Series

Published by  AISSR