From Space to Time: “Situated Knowledges,” Critical Curating, and Social Truth

Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988) put forward a critical perspective about feminism and knowledge that was to be greatly influential for emancipatory epistemologies across fields and practices—including socially engaged curating. This article concerns how the idea of “situated knowledges” might be scripted in an increasingly complex 'contemporary,' shaped by the capital and the antagonisms capital's lifeworld engenders in concerete historical conditions - conditions that critical curatorial theory is inevitably embedded in and, in many cases, also addresses. The article argues that the spatiality embedded in Haraway's thought is connected to specific aspect of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, and that a critique of the epistemology that the 1980s notion of 'situated knowledges' corresponds to is necessary in the 2020s to counter the collapse of the notion of 'truth' as in 'social truth'. The article asks for a critical rethinking of (the limitations of) the epistemologies associated with postmodernism for emancipatory projects (especially feminism) carried on into the authoritarian landscapes of 21st-century politics.