Hester, Helen (2025) Sight beyond site: from knowing your place to placing your knowing. In: Practices of Imagination, Placings of Imaginaries. De Gruyter. ISBN 9783839475850

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Abstract

This essay considers the relationship between imagination and lived experience, comparing the role that each has played in feminist politics. To do so, it returns to late twentieth- century standpoint theory and ideas about situated knowledge. The imagination is undeniably situated; what we tend to imagine is shaped by our own experiences and social positioning. And yet, the imagination can also operate as a tool of reason and as a means of better understanding that which we cannot experience. At the heart of my argument lies the suggestion that alienation—as a capacity for abstract reasoning—is facilitative of attempts to think the totality, allowing us to broaden our perspectives to identify common patterns and weave together different points of view.

While empirical modes of knowing (i.e., those grounded in sensory immediacy) offer vital resources for understanding oppression, non-empirical modes of knowing (i.e., those dependent on an ability to get beyond immediacy) provide insights that are just as valuable. Lived experience can only take us so far. To claim as much is not simply a matter of the theoretical niceties of standpoint, epistemology but crucial for the practice of coalitional politics. After all, if our political commitments were wholly limited to or determined by direct experience, solidarity would be practically impossible.

Item Type:	Book Chapter or Section
Identifier:	10.1515/9783839475850
Keywords:	Solidarity; Alienation; Situated Knowledge; Feminist Standpoint Epistemology; Multiple Consciousness
Subjects:	Arts
Related URLs:	Publisher
Date Deposited:	23 Sep 2024
Dates:	Date Publication status 15 August 2024 Accepted 27 March 2025 Published
School, department or research centre:	London School of Film, Media and Design
Keywords:	Solidarity; Alienation; Situated Knowledge; Feminist Standpoint Epistemology; Multiple Consciousness
URI:	https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/12704

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