Traversing Boundaries: Response to Commentaries by Dieter Nitzgen and Sue Einhorn

Abstract

Academics are widely assumed to know things with high levels of certainty, and therefore to be capable of offering objective statements about the world. But feminists academics, myself included, generally eschew such assumptions. The feminist argument that knowledge claims are always situated (Haraway, 1988) implies that there is no neutral vantage point from which to generate universal truths. It follows from this that communicating across disciplines is never entirely straightforward. I am grateful to Sue Einhorn and Dieter Nitzgen for venturing into such terrain in their Commentaries to my paper. The conversation into which they have entered helps to clarify some key features of the particular position from which I write.