Description

This volume is a labour of love. Of each contributor’s struggle a woman, with questions about the nature and meaning of truth and reality-in their contemporary postcolonial life-worlds.Some are raging, others are quietly persuasive. Some are scholarly, others colloquial. Since the field of feminist science studies is only

developing in the Indian context, the volumes are in the nature of initial interventions.The articles in the volumes traverse over legacies of deeply embedded hegemonic discourses and practices of west modernity in general. The paradigm of modern western science in particular, defined and determined contemporary notions of what is true and what is real, as well as what is desirable. In our articulations, we challenge and critique given constructions of knowledge and gender that restrict women’s ontological and epistemological pursuits of truth-making, in and outside of modem
western science.Further, the articles reclaim women’s right to acquire and make knowledge, they assert women’s right to be recognized as’knowers’. The volumes, as a whole, strive to assert an epistemic validity of women’s non-hegemonic ways of knowing complex
life-worlds. In this sense, the volumes are both critique and reconstruction of the relationship between modern western
science as a knowledge-making system and women’s claims to science and knowledge. Of course, the uniqueness of the volumes is their situatedness in the Indian context.
‘If we delve into the philosophy of science, and its methods of inquiry, we recognize the assumptions on which it rests, namely,logical positivism, which believes that science is an objective and
value-free enterprise.(This volume) exposes brilliantly these limitations in the very philosophical basis of science.Gender,caste and class are all implicated in how science is done.’
– Maithreyi Krishnaraj, Senior Honorary Fellow, Research Centre for Women’s Studies, SNDT Women’s University.
One in four scientists in India is female-most hold lower level positions. The obvious question is what’s holding women back? Feminists and Science begins the conversation by addressing the epistemologies and practices of science in India. In a series of richly textured essays … read together, they are a powerful indictment of the practice of science … This book is a must-read
for scientists and feminists around the world.-  Geraldine Forbes,Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita, Department of History, State University of New York Oswego.