ABSTRACT
In her classic article "Women's Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology", Dorothy Smith presents her standpoint theory, noting that people inhabit and understand the world from their own particular sets of historical circumstances. Smith examines women's experience as they entered the field of sociology in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sociology was a reflection of how male sociologists understood reality. Epistemological questions include asking what constitutes knowledge, whose knowledge claims are held as truth, and what knowledge dominates popular discourse. Researchers seek to understand how meaning is constructed, how meanings emerge and evolve, and the power relations that go into the construction of knowledge. The primary event in meaning-making is communicative practice among/between humans. In this ontology, language is thus believed to be the progenitor of mind, and hence of reality. The ontological turn, then, is a turn away from this sort of cutting of knowledge.
