ABSTRACT
Situated knowledge, broadly understood, is the view that the social location of the inquirer is of epistemic importance. This chapter discusses the question of how social locations come to have epistemically significant consequences, if not always, at least under some circumstances. The social location of the inquirer can give rise to local knowledge, social experience, criticism, evidence, and novel theoretical perspectives. The inquirer is situated in a relation to other people, including epistemic communities, research participants, collaborators, and potential users of knowledge. That knowledge claims are situated does not mean that they cannot be objective. The chapter discusses also the question of how knowledge can be objective, not despite its situatedness, but because it is situated in certain ways.
