Revisiting positionality and the thesis of situated knowledge

Abstract

Feminist and queer epistemologies have been influential throughout the social sciences by means of the development of a set of interrelated approaches involving positionality, partiality, reflexivity, intersectionality, and the highly politicized thesis of situated knowledge. This article aims to operationalize these approaches by introducing an anti-humanist, politically attuned, and historically contextualized framework, which postulates that one’s knowledge is inevitably incomplete and situated because information about the world always reaches one through a channel that is constituted by four epistemic gaps: (1) ‘possible worlds versus realized world’, (2) ‘realized world versus witnessed situation’, (3) ‘witnessed situation versus remembered situation’, and (4) ‘remembered situation versus confessed situation’.

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…Such academic accounts constitute public attempts to accommodate collective surprises by updating and enriching a (sub)discipline's shared mental representations of how the world works (Simandan, 2011c(Simandan, , 2019a. It is worth mentioning in this context that popular culture itself is increasingly preoccupied with surprise, perhaps as part of the affective atmosphere of neoliberalism (Anderson, 2016), perhaps as part of a collective attempt to come to terms with, and make sense of, the global financial crisis of 2007-9, or of the 'Trump phenomenon' (Benjaminsen et al, 2018).…”

The Benefits of Robust Debate About the Place of Qualitative Research in Suicide Prevention

“…The key question we raise in our work is not whether qualitative suicide research has value, but rather, how do we work with narratives about suicide in a way that explicitly affirms the value and limitations of the data to advance the practice of suicide prevention? In common with many contemporary thinkers in qualitative and postqualitative research (Hiemstra, 2017;Hollway & Jefferson, 2012;Lather & St. Pierre, 2013;Ryan-Flood & Gill, 2013;Simandan, 2019;St. Pierre, 2014;Stamenova & Hinshelwood, 2018), we believe that researchers have a key responsibility to think carefully and deeply about what "hearing the voices" of any group of people means, and of ways in which qualitative evidence may responsibly be used to inform real-world interventions (Lewin & Glenton, 2018).…”

Answers to questions on uncertainty in geography: Old lessons and new scenario tools

“…For example, Simandan (2018a) searches for geographical scholarship on surprise, returning a small handful of papers, but one that stretches back four decades (Deutsche, 1995;Lee, 1976;Mackenzie, 2007;Mills, 2013). Moreover, the tendency for the subject to be discussed under other rubrics is evidenced in that a similar search using terms such as 'encounter' (Adams, 2017;Kallio, 2017), 'event' (Dilkes-Frayne and Duff, 2017; Shaw, 2012), 'unpredictability and uncertainty' (Simandan, 2010b;Simandan, 2019), 'estrangement' and 'extraordinary' (Ash and Simpson, 2016;Larsen and Johnson, 2012), 'risk' (Neisser and Runkel, 2017), 'hazard' (Nobert and Pelling, 2017) and 'disaster' (Hu, 2018), returns a more extensive set of literature (Simandan, 2018a). Simandan (2018a) highlights the role of ontological uncertainty in producing geographic space over time, as evident in the waves of economic transformation to inner-city Vancouver traced by Barnes and Hutton (2009).…”