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Lorraine Code
Room number: Ross 442S
Phone: 77593
email address: codelb@yorku.ca
Personal Homepage:  
Education: PhD, Guelph-McMaster Program: Dissertation Title "Knowledge and Subjectivity" MA, University of Guelph: Thesis Title: "Three Philosophies of Language: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty" BA, Queen's University
Research Interests
Dr. Code Specializes in Epistemology, Feminist Epistemology and the Politics of Knowledge; Epistemic Responsibility; Twentieth-century French Philosophy (Foucault, Beauvoir, Le Doeuff); Ecological Theory; Post-Colonial Theory
Selected Bibliography
Books:
  • 1991: What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • 1995: Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on (Gendered) Locations. New York: Routledge.

    Edited books:

  • 2000: Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories. London: Routledge (July 20 publication)
  • 2001: Feminist Interpretations of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Penn State University Press.
  • 1995: Changing Methods: Feminists Transforming Practice (with Sandra Burt). Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.
  • 1993: Changing Patterns: Women in Canada, 2nd edition (with Sandra Burt and Lindsay Dorney. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart.
Reference articles:
  • 1997: "Feminist Epistemology and Ontology". In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume. Macmillan Publishing Company.
  • 1998: "Feminist Epistemology". In the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
  • 1998: "Feminist Epistemology". In Alison Jaggar & Iris Young, eds., A Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

    Chapters in books:

  • 2000: "The Perversion of Autonomy and the Subjection of Women: Discourses of Social Advocacy at Century's End". In Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • 2000: "Naming, Naturalizing, Normalizing: The Child as Fact and Artefact". In Patricia Miller and Elin Scholnik, eds., Feminist Developmental Psychology. New York: Routledge, in press.
  • 1998."Voice and Voicelessness: A Modest Proposal?" In Janet Kourany, ed., Philosophy in a Different Voice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Articles in Refereed Journals:

  • 1996: "What Is Natural About Epistemology Naturalized?" American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 33, No. 1, 1-22.
  • 1998: "Feminists and Pragmatists: A Radical Future?" Radical Philosophy 87, 22-30.
  • 1998: "How to Think Globally: Stretching the Limits of Imagination". Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. Vol. 13 (2), 73-85.
  • 1999: "Flourishing". Ethics and the Environment, 4 (1), 63-72.
Abstract of Current Research Project:

RESPONSIBLE KNOWING, ECOLOGICAL IMAGINING, AND THE POLITICS OF EPISTEMIC LOCATION

In this project I am developing the potential of ecological thinking as a conceptual apparatus and regulative principle for a theory of knowledge - an epistemology - capable of addressing feminist, multicultural, and other postcolonial issues. My thesis is that, despite the proliferation of ecological discourses and the contested nature of the politics of ecology, the creative, restructuring possibilities of ecological thinking for epistemology have yet to be articulated. An ecologically-modelled theory will interrogate the instrumental rationality, abstract individualism, reductivism, and exploitation of people and places that western epistemologies of mastery help to legitimate. It will generate a reconfigured approach to theory of knowledge, sensitive to local and global diversity.
Ecosystems - metaphorical and literal - are as cruel as they are kind; as unpredictable and overwhelming as they are orderly and nurturant; as inspirational for romantic fantasies as for socially responsible action. To address these issues, this book will engage with recent work in environmentalism (ecofeminist and other) and the science of ecology, examining the explanatory models and conceptual practices that inform debates in these by-no-means homogeneous studies of ecosystems. My hypothesis is that the transformative potential of ecosystem-derived thinking can be realized only by active participants who take on the burdens and the blessings of identity, place, materiality, and history, to work within the locational possibilities and limitations, found and made, of human cognitive-corporeal lives. Ecological thinking relocates inquiry "down on the ground" where knowledge is made, deliberated, circulated.
This project, then, aims to develop several lines of thought that are currently disconnected, in ecological theory and practice, in naturalised epistemologies, and feminist and post-colonial theories, and within two "natural" institutions of knowledge-production - medicine and law - from which I will draw extended examples. These institutions lend themselves well to this study for they are, in practice, empirically-scientifically informed and locally interpretive. With human subjects as their "objects" of knowledge, they invoke responsibility requirements that are central to the epistemological position I am developing.

 
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