This special issue advances feminist inquiry and theorizing of the politics of knowledge within our current, highly paradoxical societal landscape. It draws together feminist analyses of “expertise” with feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, Black feminist thought, theory of affect and emotions, sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies (STS). As such, it enables a timely interdisciplinary engagement with current paradigmatic shifts in knowledge production and claims to expertise as well as an examination of the gendered and racialized epistemic authority.

For several decades, the study of “knowledge,” changing modes of knowledge production, and the dynamics shaping the recognition of expertise were largely confided to the specialized subfields of sociology of knowledge..

This article focuses on the epistemic strategies employed by ultraconservative movements to oppose women's reproductive rights and the ways in which the women's movement counteracts these efforts. The core argument is that nowadays the opponents of gender equality and sexual democracy are seeking not only political but also epistemic power, producing a new body of gender knowledge. A detailed analysis of the struggles around the 2016 Stop Abortion bill in Poland shows, however, that the women's movement can counteract these challenges by mobilizing not only medical and legal expertise, but also tacit knowledge and affects.

This article proposes the concept of feminist political epistemology to examine the changing modalities of knowledge production in Germany. The article examines how German gender equality policies have been embedded in and shaped by the shifting modalities of knowledge production and the remaking of the science expertise–politics nexus. The two formative time periods investigated—the 1960s–1970s and 1998 to the present—account for major shifts in the gender and political knowledge regime in Germany. The findings provide insights into the contradictory dynamics involved in transformations of political and epistemic authority.

This article compares family policies in Poland and the Czech Republic in order to explain why the two countries have different policies. Previous studies are right to claim that post-communist family policies are basically going in a refamilialist direction that gives mothers a greater incentive to return to the home, but they tend to neglect the important differences that exist between countries. Although previous studies were correct to emphasize the role of the anti-feminist communist legacy in explaining this trend toward re-famialilization, it is a country's economic-institutional legacy that goes the farthest in explaining the differences in policies.