Ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location
by Lorraine Code - Philosophy - 2006 - 322 pages

How could ecological thinking animate an epistemology capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other post-colonial concerns? Starting from an epistemological approach implicit in Rachel Carson's scientific practice, Lorraine Code elaborates the creative, restructuring resources of ecology for a theory of knowledge. She critiques the instrumental rationality, abstract individualism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery have legitimated, to propose a politics of epistemic location, sensitive to the interplay of particularity and diversity, and focused on responsible epistemic practice.

Drawing on ecological theory and practice, on naturalized epistemology, and on feminist and post-colonial theories, Code analyzes extended examples from developmental psychology, and from two "natural" institutions of knowledge production--medicine and law. These institutions lend themselves well to a reconfigured naturalism. They are, in practice, empirically-scientifically informed, specifically situated, and locally interpretive. With human subjects as their "objects" of knowledge, they invoke the responsibility requirements central to Code's larger project.

This book discusses a wide range of literature in philosophy, social science, and ethico-political thought. Highly innovative, it will generate productive conversations in feminist theory, and in the ethics and politics of knowledge more broadly conceived.

Rhetorical spaces: essays on gendered locations
by Lorraine Code - Philosophy - 1995 - 258 pages

The arguments in this book are informed by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, Rhetorical Spaces focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege.

Changing Methods: Feminists Transforming Practice.
Co-edited with Sandra Burt. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1995.

What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge
by Lorraine Code - Philosophy - 1991 - 349 pages

In book Lorraine Code addresses one of the most controversial questions in contemporary theory of knowledge and a question of fundamental concern for feminist theory: Is the sex of the knower epistemologically significant? Responding in the affirmative, Code offers a radical alternative to mainstream philosophy’s assumptions about what counts as knowledge and how it is to be evaluated.

Code reviews the literature of established epistemologies to unmask the prevailing assumption in Anglo-American philosophy that “the knower” is a value-free and ideologically neutral abstraction. Approaching knowledge as a social construct produced and validated through critical dialogue, she defines the knower in light of a conception of subjectivity based on a personal relational model. Code maps the relevance of asking who the knower is: their historical specificity, their relationships they have, the effects of social position and power is knowing, and how knowledge can change both knower and known. In an exploration of the politics of knowledge that mainstream epistemologies sustain, she examines such issues as the function of knowledge in shaping social and political institutions and unequal, gender-inflected distribution of cognitive authority.

Edited Reference Works

Translations

Michèle Le Dœuff, The Sex of Knowing. Translated from the French Le Sexe du savoir. (Paris: Aubier, 1998) by Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code. New York: Routledge, 2003.