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Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location

Online ISBN:
9780199786411
Print ISBN:
9780195159431
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location

Lorraine Code
Lorraine Code

Distinguished Research Professor

York University, Toronto
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Published online:
1 September 2006
Published in print:
6 April 2006
Online ISBN:
9780199786411
Print ISBN:
9780195159431
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Arguing that ecological thinking can animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns, this book critiques the instrumental rationality, hyperbolized autonomy, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated. It proposes a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practices. Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson’s scientific projects, the book draws, constructively and critically, on ecological theory and practice, on (post-Quinean) naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theory. Analyzing extended examples from developmental psychology, from medicine and law, and from circumstances where vulnerability, credibility, and public trust are at issue, the argument addresses the constitutive part played by an instituted social imaginary in shaping and regulating human lives. The practices and examples discussed invoke the responsibility requirements central to this text’s larger purpose of imagining, crafting, articulating a creative, innovative, instituting social imaginary, committed to interrogating entrenched hierarchical social structures, en route to enacting principles of ideal cohabitation.

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