In Sciences from Below, the esteemed feminist science studies scholar Sandra Harding synthesizes modernity studies with progressive tendencies in science and technology studies to suggest how scientific and technological pursuits might be linked to social justice projects around the world. Harding illuminates the idea of multiple modernities as well as three main contributions of post-Kuhnian Western, feminist, and postcolonial science studies. She explains how these schools of thought can help those seeking to implement progressive social projects and research to overcome limiting ideas about what constitutes modernity and modernization, the objectivity of scientific knowledge, patriarchy, and Eurocentricity. Harding also shows how each of these fields can inform and expand the others. As she has done before, in Sciences from Below, Sandra Harding points the way forward.Describing the work of the post-Kuhnian science studies scholars Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, and the team of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowtony, and Peter Scott, Harding reveals how, from different perspectives, they each provide useful resources for rethinking the modernity and tradition binary and its effects on the production of scientific knowledge.
Yet for the most part, they do not take feminist or postcolonial critiques into account. As Harding demonstrates, feminist science studies and postcolonial science studies have vital contributions to make; they bring to light not only the male supremacist investments in the Western conception of modernity and the historical and epistemological bases of Western science but also the empirical knowledge traditions of the global South. Sciences from Below is a clear and compelling argument that modernity studies and post-Kuhnian, feminist, and postcolonial sciences studies each have something important, and necessary, to offer to those formulating socially progressive research and policy.