East Lansing. She has been a consultant to several United Nations organizations including the U.N. Commission on Science and Technology for Development, the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO, and the U.N. Development Fund for Women. She was invited to co-edit a chapter of UNESCO's World Science Report 1996 on "The Gender Dimension of Science and Technology". This 56-page account was the first such attempt to bring gender issues in science and technology to such a global-scale and prestigious context. She was invited to contribute a chapter to UNESCO's World Social Science Report 2010 on "Standpoint Methodologies and Epistemologies: a Logic of Scientific Inquiry for People." Harding has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals in the fields of philosophy, women's studies, science studies, social research methodology, and African philosophy. Phi Beta Kappa selected her as a national lecturer in 2007. She has lectured at more than 300 colleges, universities, and conferences in North America as well as in Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia. Her books, essays and book chapters have been translated into dozens of languages and reprinted in hundreds of anthologies. Research and criticism Harding developed the research standard of "strong objectivity," and contributed to the articulation of standpoint methodology. This kind of research process starts off from questions that arise in the daily lives of people in oppressed groups. To answer such questions, it "studies up", examining the principles, practices and cultures of dominant institutions, from the design and management of which oppressed groups have been excluded. She has also contributed to the development of feminist, anti-racist, multicultural, and postcolonial studies of the natural and social sciences, asking the extent to which paradigms like feminist empiricism are useful for promoting to goals of feminist inquiry. She is the author or editor of many books and essays on these topics, and was one of the founders of the field of feminist epistemology. This work has been influential in the social sciences and in women/gender studies across the disciplines. It has helped to create new kinds of discussions about how best to relink scientific research to pro-democratic goals. In her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism, Harding touched on the pervasiveness of rape and torture metaphors for the scientific method in the writings of Francis Bacon and others. In the book, she questioned why it would not be as illuminating and honest to refer to Newton's laws