Epistemologies of Situated Knowledges: “Troubling” Knowledge in Philosophy of Education

Epistemologies of situated knowledges, advanced by scholars such as Donna Haraway, Lorraine Code, and Maureen Ford, challenge mainstream epistemology's claim to be the gold standard in determining what counts as knowledge. In this essay, James Lang uses the work of these and other feminist theorists to explicate the notion of situated knowledges and then uses this notion to trouble the legitimacy of employing Kantian‐inspired propositional rationalism to justify all knowledge claims. Lang challenges the notions of the discrete, objective, impartial, interchangeable subject and the static passivity of objects of knowing. He demonstrates the inevitable involvement of the subjective in knowledge construction and justification; he claims that knowledge is necessarily embodied, partial, and situated and, further, that its construction, claiming, and enacting are activities with moral and political ramifications. Finally, Lang shows that re‐visioning contexts of education through lenses of epistemologies of situated knowledges reveals a vastly expanded moral landscape with significant implications for educators, students, and educational theorists.