Donna Haraway argues that objectivity should not be understood as a disembodied “view from nowhere,” but as a situated, embodied, and accountable practice of knowing. Her central claim is that all knowledge is produced from particular positions, and that the strongest form of objectivity comes not from pretending to transcend location, but from recognising the partial perspective through which one sees. Haraway rejects both positivist objectivity, which imagines a neutral observer, and relativism, which treats all perspectives as equivalent. Instead, she proposes “situated knowledges”: forms of inquiry that are partial, embodied, historically specific, and responsible for their own conditions of vision. Vision is crucial to her argument because Western science has often used sight as a metaphor for mastery, distance, and control; Haraway reclaims vision as a mediated and embodied practice shaped by instruments, bodies, technologies, and politics. Her conclusion is that feminist objectivity requires accountable positioning, critical interpretation, and solidarity among partial perspectives. Knowledge is strongest when it knows where it speaks from.
URBANISM MEETS ART