Situated knowledges

With Myriam Dao (artist), Maryam Tafakori (filmmaker and Performance artist) and Diana Allan (filmmaker and anthropologist)

Richard Dumy (SACRe PhD student) will open the Festival conversations by presenting his work.

The round table will be hosted by Alice Leroy (visual studies researcher and critic at Les Cahiers du cinéma)

Festival Conversations are accessible for English speakers.

The idea of “situated knowledges” was conceptualised by feminist biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway in 1988 in opposition to the idea that scientific objectivity can exist. “Situated knowledge” implies questioning the position of the person producing the knowledge, the limits of their vision, and the power relations in which this knowledge is embedded.
It is by becoming aware of this position and of the “place from which it speaks” that the individual may be able to achieve greater objectivity. The questioning and criticism of scientific objectivity concerns the methods adopted, the objects studied, the places where science is developed, and the criteria of scientific validity.

“I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: Feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledge.”

In 1988, philosopher Donna Haraway called for the formulation of alternative scientific narratives, knowledge rooted in localised and “embedded” perspectives. These “situated knowledges”, which she opposed to the “ideological doctrines of disembodied scientific objectivity-enshrined in elementary textbooks and technoscience booster literature”, requires first and foremost an awareness of the place from which we speak, but also of the gendered, racialised, historicised bodies through which we speak. “Situated knowledges” do not, however, reduce knowledge to an opinion, or even a construct.

What if objectivity, the cardinal value of a certain documentary mythology, were merely a misguided vision of its protean history and formalist preoccupations? What if there were no neutrality of the gaze or distant observation, but rather different ways of relating to situations and states of the world? What if documentaries, more than any other form, were part of a critical and reflexive history of our own bodies and experiences?

Since its creation, the Festival conversations has hosted performances, screenings and talks by artist-researchers from the SACRe doctoral program, a partner of Cinéma du réel.