Periodica Encyclopedia
A Living Archive of Women’s Health
The Periodica Encyclopedia is open-access and dedicated to expanding how knowledge about the body is understood, produced, and shared. It brings together biomedical research, lived experience, and non-Western and indigenous approaches to health in a space that continually evolves.
At its core is a simple premise: knowledge about the body should be accessible to the people it comes from.
Historically, much of what is considered legitimate medical knowledge has been shaped within narrow institutional frameworks. This has often excluded and marginalised other ways of understanding the body—particularly those rooted in midwifery, community care, and non-Western traditions. The result is not only a gap in research, but a limitation in how health itself is defined.
The Encyclopedia responds to this by drawing on the idea that all knowledge is situated. As Donna Haraway writes, “the knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole… it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly.” In other words, knowledge does not come from a neutral or complete perspective. It is shaped by experience, context, and position.
Rather than treating this as a weakness, this approach recognises that partial perspectives allow for the possibility to “see together without claiming to be another.” Understanding the body, then, does not come from a single authoritative voice, but from bringing different perspectives into relation with one another.
This also challenges the long-standing idea of objectivity in science as something detached and universal. As Haraway argues, we need to reclaim a way of understanding the body that acknowledges how knowledge is shaped through vision, power, and technology. What we see, measure, and define as health is never neutral; it is shaped by how we are taught to understand the body and by the systems that decide what counts as knowledge.
Rather than attempting to present a single, objective account of women’s health, the Encyclopedia embraces this partiality. It is built on what Haraway describes as “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, situating,” in which knowledge emerges from specific bodies, experiences, and contexts rather than from an abstract, universal view “from nowhere.”
In practice, this means the Encyclopedia does not prioritise one form of knowledge over another. Biomedical research sits alongside indigenous practices, holistic approaches, and lived experience. Each entry reflects not a fixed truth, but an ongoing conversation; one that remains open to revision, expansion, and critique.
As the archive grows, so too does its ability to reflect the complexity of women’s health. New research findings, community knowledge, and historical practices are continuously added, creating a resource that is both cumulative and responsive.
The Periodica Encyclopedia is not a finished body of knowledge. It is a living system that recognises that understanding the body is always in progress, always situated, and always shared.
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