Stories and Standpoint Theory: Toward a More Responsible and Defensible Thinking from Others’ Lives

Abstract

Some classrooms have broadened their horizons since my classmates and I learned about “primitive” African cultures, presented reports glorifying “the great European explorers,” and studied the history of states. In recent years, more teachers and scholars have brought under discussion perspectives excluded from dominant cultural texts. Publications and films have likewise multiplied that narrate the world from the standpoint of people who have struggled against oppression and exploitation. Feminist standpoint theorists, including Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins, lend philosophical support to such efforts to integrate marginalized perspectives into the curriculum, for they argue that knowledge that serves the interests of all people, and not just an elite few, must begin by thinking from the standpoint of members of oppressed and exploited groups.

What kinds of knowledge … do we need in order to live at all, and to live more reasonably with one another on this planet, from this moment on?

—Sandra Harding¹