Sandra Harding received her undergraduate degree fromDouglass College of Rutgers University in 1956. After 12 years working as legal researcher, editor, and fifth-grade math teacher in New York City and Poughkeepsie, N.Y., she returned to graduate school and earned a doctorate from the Department of Philosophy atNew York University in 1973.[1]
Harding's first university teaching job was at The Allen Center of theState University of New York at Albany, an experimental critical social sciences college which was "defunded" by the state of New York in 1976. She then joined the Department of Philosophy at theUniversity of Delaware, with a joint appointment to the Women's Studies Program. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1979, and to full Professor in 1986. From 1981 until she left Delaware in 1996, she held a Joint Appointment to the Department of Sociology. She was Director of the Women's Studies Program at Delaware 1985–1991 and 1992–1993.[1]
From 1994 to 1996, she was Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies atUCLA on a half-time basis. In 1996, she was appointed Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, which is a research institute. She held that position until 2000. Meanwhile, since 1996 she has been a Professor in the Graduate Department of Education and the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA. In 2012, she was appointed Distinguished Professor of Education and Gender Studies. From 2000 to 2005, she also was co-editor ofSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.[1]
She was a consultant to several United Nations organizations including the U.N.Commission on Science and Technology for Development, thePan American Health Organization,UNESCO, and theU.N. Development Fund for Women. She was invited to co-edit a chapter of UNESCO's World Science Report 1996 on "The Gender Dimension of Science and Technology".[5] This 56-page account was the first such attempt to bring gender issues in science and technology to such a global-scale and prestigious context. She was invited to contribute a chapter to UNESCO's World Social Science Report 2010 on "Standpoint Methodologies and Epistemologies: a Logic of Scientific Inquiry for People."[6][1]
Harding served on the editorial boards of numerous journals in the fields of philosophy, women's studies, science studies, social research methodology, and African philosophy.Phi Beta Kappa selected her as a national lecturer in 2007. She had lectured at more than 300 colleges, universities, and conferences in North America as well as in Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Her books, essays and book chapters have been translated into dozens of languages and reprinted in hundreds of anthologies.[1]
Harding developed the research standard of "strong objectivity," and contributed to the articulation ofstandpoint methodology. This kind of research process starts off from questions that arise in the daily lives of people in oppressed groups. To answer such questions, it "studies up", examining the principles, practices and cultures of dominant institutions, from the design and management of which oppressed groups have been excluded. She has also contributed to the development of feminist, anti-racist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies of the natural and social sciences, asking the extent to which paradigms likefeminist empiricism are useful for promoting to goals of feminist inquiry. She was the author or editor of many books and essays on these topics and was one of the founders of the field offeminist epistemology. This work had been influential in thesocial sciences and inwomen/gender studies across the disciplines. It has helped to create new kinds of discussions about how best to relink scientific research to pro-democratic goals.
In her 1986 bookThe Science Question in Feminism, Harding touched on the pervasiveness of rape and torture metaphors for thescientific method in the writings ofFrancis Bacon and others. In the book, she questioned why it would not be as illuminating and honest to refer toNewton's laws as "Newton's rape manual" rather than "Newtonian mechanics". Harding later said she regretted the statement.[7] This statement, among others, caused Harding's work to be controversial within certain scholarly circles.[8] During theScience Wars, a debate regarding the value-neutrality of the sciences of the 1990s, her work became a main target of critics of feminist and sociological approaches.
^"Sandra G. Harding papers 1971 – 2016".Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. Brown University Archives and Manuscripts. RetrievedApril 10, 2024.
^"Sandra Harding".UCLA College of Gender Studies. RetrievedApril 10, 2024.
^Steiner, Linda (2014), "Sandra Harding: the less false accounts of feminist standpoint epistemology", in Hannan, Jason (ed.),Philosophical profiles in the theory of communication, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 261–289,ISBN9781433126345.
^Koblitz, Ann Hibner (1987). "A historian looks at gender and science".International Journal of Science Education.9 (3):399–407.doi:10.1080/0950069870090318.
^Harding, Sandra (1994). "Science is 'Good to Think With'". In Ross, Andrew (ed.).The Science Wars. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. pp. 15–28.doi:10.2307/466841.JSTOR466841.
^Gross, Paul; Levitt, Norman (1994).Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.ISBN9780801857072.
^Hart, Roger (1996). "The Flight From Reason: Higher Superstition and the Refutation of Science Studies". In Ross, Andrew (ed.).Science Wars. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.ISBN9780822318712.
Harding, Sandra. 2002. "Philosophy as Work and Politics," in The Philosophical I: Personal Reflections on Life in Philosophy, ed. George Yancy. Lanham Mass: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 23–42
Hinterberger, Amy. 2013. "Curating postcolonial critique", Social Studies of Science 43(4) 619–627. (Review of The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader.)
Hirsch, Elizabeth and Gary A. Olson "Starting From Marginalized Lives A Conversation with Sandra Harding," JAC 15:2. (1995).
Marsan, Loren. 2008. "Thinking from Women's Lives: Sandra Harding, Standpoint, and Science."Video.
Richardson, Sarah S. 2010. "Feminist philosophy of science: history, contributions, and challenges," Synthese 177:337–362.
Rooney, Phyllis. 2007. "The Marginalization of Feminist Epistemology and What That Reveals About Epistemology 'Proper'". In Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science Power in Knowledge., ed. Heidi Grasswick. Dordrecht: Springer.
Steiner, Linda (2014), "Sandra Harding: the less false accounts of feminist standpoint epistemology", in Hannan, Jason (ed.),Philosophical profiles in the theory of communication, New York: Peter Lang, pp. 261–289,ISBN9781433126345
