Postmodernism and Knowledge Claims: Today's Task

My task: Well, my first task is to finish up a recommendation letter for a former student. THEN, what I have to do is figure out how we go about producing knowledge anyway, despite the postmodern critiques of truth and of knowledge claims, and write a 1500-word paper about it. One of the issues I must engage is feminist standpoint theory, particularly in Susan Hekman's "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited," and the subsequent response essays by Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, Sandra Harding, and Dorothy Smith. Big job...as an aside, I was talking to my Women's Studies professor about what topic I'd choose for this paper--the choices were situatedness in research, the challenge of interdisciplinarity, and the postmodern critique of knowledge (or, post-postmodernism). I said that I felt a little more confident doing my paper on situatedness, but I know I'll have to deal with the issues presented in the readings on postmodernism too. She said, "If you're not as confident about postmodernism, that's what you should write about." I grinned and said, "Yeah, that's what I was thinking too."