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subjective and embodied position in the sense that Haraway (1988) argues in her seminal

work Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective. She rejects the assumption that a universal knowledge can be produced from

nameless and placeless positions, challenging the idea of ‘seeing everything from nowhere’

(1988, p. 581). She suggests that the only objective vision is one that critically understands its

subjective and embodied perspective – this is a feminist vision of objectivity. To reinforce

this point she says:

There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific
accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual
possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing
worlds. (Haraway 1988, p. 583)

This is to locate the dislocated. As Geoffrey Bowker puts it knowledge can have a wide

range, however ‘this can only be done in a highly localized environment, one about which

you can say “all things being equal”’ (2010, p. 138). Here Bowker argues that the conditions

in which experiments are undertaken are specific and isolated local spaces that exclude many

of the unpredictable complexities in the world, including social and environmental

fluctuations. Even when it is precisely the localised fluctuations that scientists are studying,

as in the case of the tonnara, scientists nonetheless do this in order to make wider claims

about the nature of tuna and the nature of human fish interactions. I focus on the generation

of scientific knowledge about tuna and the course that this knowledge takes in its process of

becoming universal, or ‘seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway 1998, p. 581). Yet

situations are always more complex. For example, some of the scientists who work with the

traps know all too well that they are seeing tuna from a specific, local and historical context.

However, these scientists operate within an environmental way of ordering requiring their

work to be transmitted into statistics and policy and therefore generalised claims about tuna.

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