She was a Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies at UCLA in 1996-2014, directed UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999
Cynthia Enloe, Emily Harding-Morick, Gail Kligman and Joni Seager
Sandra G. Harding, a global trailblazer in feminist and postcolonial philosophy, critical science and technology studies and social justice and activism died March 5. She was 89.
Harding is internationally acclaimed for her pioneering development of “standpoint theory,” which apprehended science as a contextualized and culturally embedded undertaking, in sharp distinction to the conventional view of science as neutral and objective. Her standpoint analysis challenged both Liberal analytic philosophy’s tendency to think of science as value free, and orthodox Marxism’s approach that limited its standpoint epistemology to primarily a class perspective largely ignoring race, ethnicity and gender. Her work had enormous impact across disciplines, sparking lively debates and critical engagement with her ideas.
Harding developed her analyses first through socialist-feminist organizing, women’s rights activism and then ever-widening engagement with Civil Rights, Poor People’s movements, LGBTQ rights and anti-colonial critiques. She situated standpoint theory as an organic methodological development rooted in her social justice activism, noting that “it tends to emerge whenever a new group steps on the stage of history and says ‘things look different from the perspective of our lives’.” An important component of standpoint theory is what she identified as “strong objectivity,” a term that describes research grounded in the experiences of those who have traditionally been excluded from the production of knowledge.
Harding was a professor at the University of Delaware from 1975-1996, and then at UCLA until 2014; prior to her retirement, she was Distinguished Professor of Education and gender studies and then Distinguished Research Professor Emerita. She served as Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996-1999.
She authored or edited 18 books, including the prize-winning “The Science Question in Feminism” and “The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future.” A forthcoming book, “Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agencies,” will be published posthumously. Astonishingly prolific, Harding also published more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters.
Harding was in considerable demand globally as a visiting lecturer, and over the course of her distinguished career presented more than 500 invited lectures across 6 continents. Harding also served as a consultant to several international entities including UNESCO, the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development and UNIFEM. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science.
Harding was always attentive to the importance of building networks with intellectual allies and activists. She was a highly influential and lifelong member of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), and in 1975-1976 worked with SWIP to edit syllabi for the first feminist philosophy courses offered in the United States. She was a member of the editorial board of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy from its founding in the 1980s to 2000. In 2000 she was invited to become co-editor of the leading international journal in women’s and gender studies, SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.
In 2016, Harding collaborated with scholars from Latin America as a co-founding advisor for a new academic journal, Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society, created to serve as a forum for science-technology-society research that elicits conversations within Latin America, between Latin America and Euro-American cultures, and across global peripheries. A brief memoriam on the journal’s homepage remarks that “Sandra understood the need to question whose perspectives have shaped Western science, philosophy, and social studies of science. She also recognized the urgency of amplifying STS scholars from the Global South. That’s why, in 2016, she conspired with Latin American scholars to create Tapuya. This journal exists because of her tenacity and vision.”
Harding is survived by her daughters Dorian and Emily, her beloved granddaughter Eva and sisters Constance Joy and Victoria.
A celebration of Harding’s life will be held later in 2025.
Media Contact: cchaveznava@college.ucla.edu