Evidence: as both socially constructed and imposes decisive limitations
on what can be claimed
Research on gender and archaeology, some of it motivated by feminists concerns
Feminist science studies:
Empirical claim: gender systems (material and symbolic) are political systems
that generally oppress women
Normative claim: Systems (gendered, racial, classist, and cultural) that
divide power along socially-salient categorical lines, should be changed.
How could gender (or any other political system) impact science?
From the philosophy of science and science studies:
Theory-ladeness of observation
Role of auxiliary assumptions
Historicism/contextualism
History of science
From self-reflexive archaeology:
Nationalism
Colonialism
Eurocentrism
Androcentrism
Mechanisms:
Erasure
Distortion
Political resonance
The politics of objectivism
Explanatory critiques
“They show how external (noncognitive) factors determine what data will be
collected and how they will be construed as evidence, what interpretive and
explanatory hypotheses will be taken seriously and accepted (sometimes evidence
notwithstanding), and what range of revisions or corrections will be considered
when evidence resists being appropriated in terms of entrenched presuppositions.”
Tension between postmodern and emancipatory projects in feminism
Relativism?
“Bad” science only?
Her model:
The security of the background knowledge invoked to establish
a link
between evidence (the surviving record) and the past conditions
that
produced it and the epistemic independence of the evidence
thus constituted