“Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege a Partial Perspective”, is a 1988 essay by Donna Haraway. The essay and concept of Situated Knowledge (SK) is an extension of Haraway’s emancipatory politics – in this instance, addressing how knowledge is established and who is qualified to be the authority on a particular subject. It is about the privileging and privilege of partial perspective in consideration of objectivity and the structuring of facts, subjects, and artefacts. Embedded in the essay is a challenge to the ‘god-trick’ – the tools, rhetoric, and instruments offer to generate (scientific) truth. This essay is a test of empiricism and a priori methods in a world where “no practitioner of the high scientific arts would be caught dead acting on the textbook versions” of established scientific method⁴Ibid., 576. SK is a thinking practice to do the scholarly work of responsible accounts of reality – a practice extending into public spheres as it implicates that all knowledge seekers remain responsible to the formulation of truth and the power imposed by it.

Knowledge comes to be through a litmus test involving established methods executed by the learned who ‘have’ the skills and facts needed to interpret and therefore speak on behalf of a subject. Haraway refers to this as a ‘god-trick’: an all-seeing approach that measures factuality against its aversion to subjectivity and special interests. In this world, the knower is invisible yet omnipresent, facts established by peer-reviewed, unbiased experts, unaffected by personal interests and commitments. That being said, even in the 1980s, the possibility of ‘special interests’ extended in all directions, holding experts and lay people accountable to objectivity and universality. An opinion is reasonable, but they are always based on facts.

An ability to state the limits of your position in formulating an opinion and interpretation is a way to account for potential bias and/or absolve yourself of responsibility for seeing from another’s. Disclosing ‘where you are coming from,’ ‘where you are not’ and ‘where you can’t be’ is one way to communicate the limits of perspective. An admonition is a way of remaining accountable to overlooked and taken-for-granted forms of knowledge and the ways it might dominate another’s⁵As such, stating a standpoint, a location, is a natural progression of situated knowledge.  The subject of standpoint and location are addressed elsewhere.. However, admonition can also be a manoeuvre towards absolution of responsibility. Haraway is holding everyone responsible for how power and domination are established through our relationship to and communication of ‘facts’. Stating positions, a communication of any individual’s partial perspective, follows an ethics of equality through an amplification and platforming of marginalised locations.

With this moral and a strong desire to support the “earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness”, an overzealous locating practice potentially separates from the desired Other locations, the other partial perspectives, contributing to a real vision. The problem is, and Haraway says as much, that the tools to collect and realise this collection of partial perspectives are something ‘we’ have not learned, especially in our bodies. Our bodies, where we feel these ‘opinions’ to be true, have been denied for long enough that they are historically marginalised and, in many cases, unrecognisable as producers of any possible truths. If a conversation regarding multiple perspectives is desired, one that constructs reality through rendering multiple realities, Harawy proposes that seeing from another position, ‘seeing from below’ is a means reposition yourself without delusion.

Subsequently and somewhat directly, the essay gestures to identity factoring into qualifications for partial perspectives that must be included. However, in a 2024 interview, Haraway clarifies that SK and its associate, standpoint theory, were never meant to be about people in the margins, nor a theory of identity in itself. She emphasised SK as an exercise and practice that enables greater flourishing. A partial perspective is not a specific ‘point’ based on identity or experience – it is “never something you have … it is something crafted, a labour of love and work … something that can be strong or weak that takes care and feeding”. She went as far as saying:

Thoughts and thinking practices always take on a life of their own, regardless of her stated intentions. SK has taken on a life of its own in the decades since writing, generating sufficient experiments with locating and location that manoeuvre towards aspirations of ‘seeing from below’. However, many of these experiments led to the essentialism and resignation of responsibility Haraway points to. How ideas are applied in practice reflects a zeitgeist of an era. Geo-temporally unpicking something like standpoint theory mindfully provides insights into these worlds by revealing the most ‘dominant’ use. Right now, the most dominant knower with the best qualifications is most often the one who ‘sees from below’. Through her rhetorical devices of her own, Haraway exemplified this by way of the historically subjugated, the less powerful.

The frequency of which voice is present is an effect of situating knowledge. Knowing when to speak, shut up, reposition, or otherwise engage with the world is part of an ongoing learning process that seeks to observe and interpret with better responsibility and accuracy. A situating practice, having a standpoint, and acts of relocating all contribute to the desubjugating project that Haraway and her colleagues aspire towards. Each of these factors is distinct, interrelated and needs attending to. It is a labour-intensive practice to keep a balance between the three. A situating practice is the conjunction between observation, interpretation and describing experience. It relies on ‘thoughts’ and ‘knowledge about’ positions and places. It is a practice that relies on explaining where the affective, social and political intersect.

Situating experience, that is, placing your individual reality in context, is not situated knowledge. Situating experience is a descriptive practice that offers insight to readers and listeners regarding the possible viewpoints of the authors⁸. I am cautious of using the term ‘standpoint’ here as it has a particular meaning in this context, which is addressed elsewhere.. Situated knowledge is a composition of “elaborate specificity and difference” and not “allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability”. It is a loving act of learning that is mindful of “romanticising and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful” while still not exempting any position from a “critical reexamination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation⁹Ibid., 583–84. .” While a situating practice may disclose how perspective is realised through identitarian elements, such as the lived experience of your specific kind of body, heritage, ethnicity, class or race, the identitarian elements are there in service to a larger project with “a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths¹⁰Ibid., 584..” In other words, it is a repositioning project.