Situated Knowledges - Critical Social Psychology (5/30)

well situated knowledge --is is a very useful term because immediately reminds us that knowledge is never pure simple and never comes from no viewpoint what I mean by that is it always comes from a viewpoint and several viewpoints often so it's always situated in ordinary terms to say that knowledge is situated means that there isn't some general completely value-free context-free knowledge that is a historical and uncomplete Lee the same knowledge is always situated somewhere and in some time and what something means in that place and that time difference from what it means somewhere else whenever knowledge is thought produced and disseminated it's always because it is situated it's situated in a certain time and situate historically it's situated in certain places and it varies from place to place it changes with social change knowledge is change social psychology has changed and continues to change in many ways and it's also situated in terms of values belief systems and cultural differences and so when you look from the outside at social psychology when you step back and try and make sense of it it's really very useful to be able to say I see that that happened because it was 1950s it was North America it was when a certain scientific idea of social psychology dominated and therefore it's not surprising that this is the kind of knowledge that was produced and so we use this idea in the course to situate the kind of social psychology which were showing to students certainly social psychological knowledge azar situated but so it is that everyday common sensical knowledge the things we take for granted in living out everyday lives that social psychologists are deeply interested in are also situated to be a wife in these is in the 2000 and something's is very different from being a wife even when I was a wife the first time around in the in the 1960s and 70s to talk about what a good wife is or or being a good wife it is to talk about two very very different things between those two times so the knowledge of what being a good wife is has changed to be a good wife in this culture and to be a good wife in a Township in South Africa or in a small village in Shropshire compared to being in an inner city in Los Angeles you know what wife means in those different places is profoundly different

Channel: OpenLearn from The Open University

Views: 35,917

Keywords: unconscious, conscious, emotion, social, society, context, desire, qualitative, interpretive, theory, identity, psyche, environment, feelings, ou_DD307, open university

Id: bviRiZRzwV4

Length: 3min 7sec (187 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2011