There is no view from nowhere. Every claim is made from somewhere, by someone.
Literal meaning: Situated knowledge is Donna Haraway’s epistemological concept: all knowledge is produced from a specific position — a body, a location, a set of interests, a historical moment. There is no neutral, objective, view-from-nowhere. The claim to objectivity — the “god trick,” as Haraway calls it — is itself a position, one that conceals its situatedness behind a claim to universality.
Origin: Haraway developed the concept in her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” published in Feminist Studies. She was responding to two positions she found equally inadequate: naive realism (there is one true account of the world, accessible through correct method) and radical social constructivism (all accounts are equally constructed, therefore equally valid). Situated knowledge offered a third way: partial, accountable, embodied knowledge that is rigorous precisely because it acknowledges its position.
The claim that all knowledge is produced from a specific position — and that claiming otherwise is not objectivity but a particular kind of power.
The Appeal: Situated knowledge offers a way to take both knowledge and power seriously simultaneously. Science is real; it is also produced from positions with interests. The concept does not dismiss expertise — it asks expertise to account for itself.
The Friction: The concept is frequently misread as relativism — the claim that all knowledge is equally valid because all is situated. This is the opposite of Haraway’s argument. She claims that partial, positioned, accountable knowledge is more rigorous than the false universalism it replaces. Black Box — the system that conceals its workings — is the structural embodiment of situated knowledge’s opposite: a claim to neutral output that conceals the inputs, decisions, and positions that produced it. Unblackboxing is the analytical practice that situated knowledge demands: tracing who made the knowledge, from where, and with what interests. Informatics of Domination applies the framework to information systems specifically.
Why This Matters: Situated knowledge is the epistemological foundation for most of this vault’s methodology. Every term analysis asks: who coined this term, from where, and whose interests does its current use serve? That is situated knowledge in practice.
Related terms: Informatics of Domination · Cyborg · Black Box · Unblackboxing · Cyberfeminism
Read more:
- Situated Knowledges — Haraway, D. (1988). Feminist Studies
- Simians, Cyborgs, and Women — Haraway, D. (1991). Routledge