Feminist Participatory Research Research Articles

CRETA Project

This article gives an account of a two-year project named CRETA (participatory construction of egalitarian societies) carried out by a group of 20 people in northern Italy. The initiative has tried to find concrete paths to establish an egalitarian society by building a new religious paradigm inspired by Modern Matriarchal Studies. After intensive training sessions, the participants began to develop concrete steps to get closer to the goal of creating an egalitarian community. The core aspects of matriarchal spirituality chosen by the participants which inspired the whole project are gender equality, immanent divinity and a cyclical worldview. The article presents the main results of the feminist participatory research that accompanied the community project. The pursuit of the participants to establish new, egalitarian religious practices is discussed and the challenges and achievements are reflected.

Users and non-users in engineering and feminist participatory research on sustainable aviation

Within engineering, economics, and the natural sciences, sustainable aviation is often configured as an ecological and economic problem, which can be solved through technological innovation. In contrast to this, we set up a research project centering on social innovation, named Human demands of sustainable aviation. In the project, we combined theories from Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) with methods from Participatory Design (PD) and practice-based Ontological Design (OD). In this paper, we use our project as a case study to analyze and discuss how users and non-users are configured within different disciplinary contexts. The findings illustrate that conceptualizations and categorizations of users and non-users are not stable. They denote highly situated phenomena that emerge out of different research approaches and understandings of innovation. Power structures that are entangled with the positions researchers take, including specific theories, methods, and (implicit) values, pervade these contexts and understandings. With this in mind, we advocate for power-critical reflections on the performative effects of knowledge making as processes of world making and for inter- and transdisciplinary research to do justice to the different life worlds we inhabit. We further argue that innovation should be based on collectively negotiated visions of how we want to live in the future, instead of predictions that project our current realities into the status quo of tomorrow.

An intersectional feminist food studies praxis: Activism and care in the COVID-19 context

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare global structural inequalities, including those involving food. Although feminist frameworks have been applied to the study of food, we have much to learn about activism and environmental education (EE). In this article, I thus develop a nascent intersectional feminist food studies praxis for the field to animate important conversations about “new” ways of thinking and doing EE research for a post-pandemic future. To begin, I describe the places where I work in eastern Los Angeles County, California. Then, I provide a brief overview of intersectionality, highlighting key components informing my work. Drawing on two and a half years of feminist participatory research focused on the activist-scholar nexus, I elucidate an intersectional feminist food studies praxis that elevates the politics of knowledge, is attuned to the affective domain, and supports transformation. To conclude, I specifically highlight how these insights can influence EE research and practice.

Website review Patricia Maguire: Feminist Participatory Research, Educational and Teacher Action Research

"Website review Patricia Maguire: Feminist Participatory Research, Educational and Teacher Action Research." Educational Action Research, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2

'It's better to treat a COVID patient than a HIV patient': using feminist participatory research to assess women's challenges to access HIV care in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background:Women living with HIV in Indonesia encounter challenging obstacles to healthcare, which is exacerbated by COVID-19. Access is difficult as there are limited numbers of poorly supported healthcare providers. Women also face significant stigma when disclosing their HIV-status.Objectives:Our main purpose is to give a voice to disempowered women living with HIV, by normalising the discussion of HIV, to empower health professionals to better understand the issues faced by women living with HIV, and develop improved treatment practices.Design:Our project was guided by a Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) framework. FPAR refers to ‘a participatory and action-oriented approach to research that centres gender and women’s experiences both theoretically and practically’. It creates meaningful participation for women throughout the research process, ensuring a collective critical consciousness that challenges oppressive attitudes, beliefs, and practices that may be deeply embedded in society.Method:Purposive sampling and a thematic analysis was applied to focus group discussions with 20 women living with HIV and 20 women without HIV in Palembang, South Sumatra.Results:When women living with HIV face a difficult decision, do they disclose their status knowing that they may face stigma and even a refusal to be treated; or do they conceal their status and face not receiving the right care? In this article, we explore the stories of women living with HIV as they seek medical treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that there is no optimal solution for women as they lose whether they disclose their HIV status or not.Conclusion:Women’s stories around HIV and COVID-19 intersect with conditions such as poverty and discrimination, as well as embedded gender systems, creating overlapping barriers to treatment. Government must challenge this culture by introducing a comprehensive sex and HIV education programme. This would normalise discussions of HIV-related topics, leading to improved health outcomes.

Ethical Issues in Conducting Community-Based Participatory Research: A Narrative Review of the Literature

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is a methodology increasingly used within the social sciences. CBPR is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of research methodologies, including participatory research, participatory action research, feminist participatory research, action research, and collaborative inquiry. At its core, they share five key attributes: (i) community as a unit of identity; (ii) an approach for the vulnerable and marginalized; (iii) collaboration and equal partnership throughout the entire research process; (iv) an emergent, flexible, and iterative process; and (v) the research process is geared toward social action. While there is no shortage of literature that highlights the benefits and potential of CBPR, relatively little discussion exists on the ethical issues associated with the methodology. In particular, current gaps within the literature include ethical guidance in (i) balancing community values, needs, and identity with those of the individual; (ii) negotiating power dynamics and relationships; (iii) working with stigmatized populations; (iv) negotiating conflicting ethical requirements and expectations from Institutional Review Boards (IRBs); and (v) facilitating social action emerging from the findings. For CBPR’s commendable goals and potential to be realized, it is necessary to have a more fulsome discussion of the ethical issues encountered while implementing a CBPR study. Further, a lack of awareness and critical reflection on such ethical considerations may perpetuate the very same problems this methodology seeks to address, namely, inequality, oppression, and marginalization. The purpose of this article is to provide a narrative review of the literature that identifies ethical issues that may arise from conducting CBPR studies, and the recommendations by researchers to mitigate such challenges.

Standing in Between: The Healing Praxis of Mayan Women Intermediaries in Post-Genocide Guatemala

ABSTRACTThis article examines how Mayan intermediaries make meaning of their roles in accompanying Mayan women survivors of gross violations of human rights as they search for truth, justice, and reparation in post-genocide Guatemala. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, the authors analyzed in-depth interviews with six intermediaries who worked with survivors in the context of a seven year feminist participatory and action research project. The findings reveal that healing from the legacies of armed conflict as well as from historical racialized gendered oppression are at the core of Mayan intermediaries’ work with the Mayan women survivors with whom they established an intersubjective relationship, contributing to each other’s healing. The importance of economic justice for survivors’ healing and the scant and circumscribed talk about sexual violence—the grievance central to the work with most of the survivors—emerge as important findings of this study and require future exploration.

Participation in Practice: A Case Study of a Collaborative Project on Sexual Offences in South Africa

In this article we critically reflect on ‘feminist research methods’ and ‘methodology’, from the perspective of a feminist research unit at a South African university, that explicitly aims to improve gender-based violence service provision and policy through evidence-based advocacy. Despite working within a complex and inequitable developing country context, where our feminist praxis is frequently pitted against seemingly intractable structural realities, it is a praxis that remains grounded in documenting the stories of vulnerable individuals and within a broader political project of working towards improving the systems that these individuals must navigate under challenging social and structural conditions. We primarily do this by working with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) providing gender-based violence services in research conceptualisation, design and implementation. This raises unique and complex questions for feminist participatory research, which we illustrate through a case study of collaborative, participatory research with NGOs to improve health and criminal justice outcomes for survivors of sexual violence. Issues include the possibility of good intentions/good research designs failing; the suitability of participatory research in sensitive service provision contexts; the degree(s) of engagement between researchers, service providers (collaborators/participants) and research participants; as well as our ethical duties to do no harm and to promote positive, progressive change through personal narratives and other forms of evidence. Given the demands of our context and these core issues, we not only argue that there are no ‘feminist methods’, but also caution against the notion of a universal ‘feminist methodology’. Whilst we may all be in agreement about the centrality of gender to our research and analysis, the fundamental aims and assumptions of mainstream (Western) feminist approaches do not hold true in all contexts, nor are they without variance in mode, ideal degrees of participation and importance to social context.

Minga biographic workshops with highly skilled migrant women: enhancing spaces of inclusion

This article proposes the notion of ‘marginalised elites’ to examine highly skilled migrant women, a group that has been neglected by feminist participatory research. It asks what principles and methods can be used towards inclusive practices in studies of migration and social exclusion. The paper contributes to the literature by designing and critically evaluating the method of Minga biographic workshops, which create inclusionary spaces of data collection and critical analysis with highly skilled migrant women living in Switzerland. Using this case study, the paper questions notions of privilege, power and positionality commonly used in feminist participatory approaches. Minga workshops enhance spaces of inclusion, become ‘spaces of personal transformation’, question the perceived inferiority of migrant women, and produce original scientific insights on social exclusion. These results point to the role of academics as facilitators of personal transformation, and the need to closely consider the added scientific value of feminist participatory methodologies.

Exploring women's care for the local environment: a community-based feminist participatory research approach

We give an account here of a community-based research strategy designed to explore and understand women's care for the environment. Within a feminist participatory framework, we employed three methods – local history research, in-depth individual interviews, and a photovoice project – to engage women in a small town in south-east Queensland to reflect on and illustrate their practices of environmental care. The findings affirm the need for community researchers to include the physical environment in definitions of ‘community’, to attend to the different ways men and women may view the principles and practices of environmental care, and to consider a variety of data-gathering methods, both verbal and visual, in their work with women. It is, we suggest, a researcher's attention to context and the use of a combination of research methods that best enable women to give voice to their environmental knowledge and practices.

Feminist participatory research in a social justice organization

The authors of this article are staff members of a not-for-profit and non-hierarchical Canadian social justice organization. As members of a co-management team, they were mandated by their colleagues to lead research on the organization’s practice. In this article, they share their experience of conducting feminist participatory action research in an environment that functions by consensus. They provide an overview of the organization’s work and structure, then outline how the collective research process unfolded. The authors then discuss the synergy between the organizational structure and the research, that is, how staff members’ practice and commitment to process and consensus facilitated and strengthened the research. Finally, they share findings related to the importance of process for building alliances, learning, and collective action domestically and internationally.

Authentic representation? Using video as counter-hegemony in participatory research with poor working-class women

This paper examines the processes and outcomes of employing video in a feminist participatory research project at a Sure Start programme in the United Kingdom. Sure Start is a government initiative targeting young children and their families in order to ameliorate health, social and educational disadvantages. The project worked with a group of poor working-class mothers who went on to produce their own visual accounts of their experiences of raising children in poverty. The paper looks at the hegemonic representations of poor working-class women in the popular media and discusses how the use of participatory video can challenge these taken-for-granted images, thus providing an 'authentic' alternative to commonly held assumptions.

From sea to cyberspace: women’s leadership and learning around information and communication technologies in Coastal Newfoundland

Due to a moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992, small, isolated coastal villages in Newfoundland suffer increasing unemployment, health problems and threats of re‐location by the government. In the hopes of addressing some of these problems, the Burgeo Broadcasting System (BBS) placed video‐conferencing and broad‐band internet into five small communities on the southwest coast. The purpose of our feminist participatory research process was to engage women in these communities in individual and collective discussions around the problems and potentials of these Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in terms of learning, health, well‐being and economic resilience. We discovered the major problems are technical capacity and training, the top‐down implementation of the ICT process, indifference and a belief in the neutrality of technology. But we also uncovered a healthy resistance when and where it mattered, profound alacrity to using and learning the equipment if it meant a benefit to the community, a holistic pedagogical view and a strong sense of collective agency and responsibility. These have important implications for strengthening community‐based ICT education and research.

Researching Gay and Lesbian Domestic Violence

The purpose of this article is to present the author's personal journey as a heterosexual woman conducting research on domestic violence within the LGBT community. The contributions of these studies to the theoretical and knowledge base of this social problem provide evidence of the ability of a nonaffiliated member to produce meaningful and sensitive research within an oppressed population even on a sensitive topic. In this article the author presents her rationale, as an outsider, for being interested in the LGBT community and, more importantly, her adoption of eight innovative strategies to overcome methodological barriers. These strategies emerged from her initially designing these studies based on the feminist participatory research model. Each strategy is discussed with particular attention paid to the one that most influenced her lifeimmersion into the culture. Also presented are the exchanges of rigor for relevance in her research, and her perceptions of the costs and benefits of conducting research within a stigmatized population.

Women living with chronic illness experienced transition that involved stages of distress and a quest for ordinariness

Kralik D. The quest for ordinariness: transition experienced by midlife women living with chronic illness. J Adv Nurs2002 ; 39 : 146 –54 [OpenUrl][1][CrossRef][2][PubMed][3][Web of Science][4] QUESTION: What is the...

Exploring Alternative Research Epistemologies for Adult Education: Participatory Research, Feminist Research and Feminist Participatory Research

Although there has been a growing interest in participatory research and feminist research as streams of social science inquiry, they remain largely peripheral to North American adult education research paradigms. This paper is based on the premise that alternative epistemologies can enhance research practices and further the democratizing aims of adult education. The authors review the emergence of participatory, feminist, and the developing feminist participatory approaches with emphasis on international dimensions of research interests. Possible ways in which these emancipatory approaches can reconceptualize and impact adult education discourse and research frameworks are suggested.

Considering More Feminist Participatory Research: What's Congruency Got to Do With It?

The article proposes that there cannot be truly emancipatory participatory research or participatory research advocates without explicit incorporation of feminist perspectives. As part of the larger dialogue regarding taking sides through research, the author asks us to consider a more feminist participatory research. The basis of her argument relates to issues of ontological congruency. After defining feminism(s), the article briefly identifies the androcentric and incongruous aspects of participatory research. It con cludes with specific areas for discussion if we are to consider more feminist participatory research.

Studying Partner Abuse in Lesbian Relationships:

Research on sensitive topics with a stigmatized and largely closeted population such as lesbians can be a daunting enterprise. Nevertheless, such research is valuable for revealing the serious social problems that lesbians experience, for documentating the extent of these problematic experiences, for uncovering the causes of the problems, and for suggesting solutions. In this article, the author argues that the methodological difficulties inherent in undertaking such research can often be best addressed by utilizing a feminist participatory research model. The benefits of this model, examined in the context of one researcher's experience in studying partner abuse in lesbian relationships, include allowing members of invisible and oppressed groups to shape research about themselves and to give voice to their experiences; allowing researchers to share their professional skills, but also become learners during the research process; improving the quality and accuracy of the data; and facilitating personal and...

Secondary power source: High school students as participatory researchers

Conditions that foster and hinder participatory research are examined, using examples from one such research project aimed at dropout reduction undertaken with students in a “last chance” high school. Student researchers sometimes used racial, gender, and social class differences to gain power and display undemocratic behavior within the group. Dilemmas arose as small-scale actions were implemented that seemed to threaten the power and authority of teachers and administrators both within the alternative school and the traditional high schools that fed into it. The limits to extending democracy to students through research are identified, drawing upon recent theoretical work on feminist pedagogy and participatory research. The conclusion is that youths need to be taken seriously as knowers and potential agents of change and that adults who want to work with adolescent researchers need to model democratic teaching and leadership.

Exploring gender and culture with Khmer refugee women

This article discusses the process and findings from a study based on the paradigm of feminist participatory research. The research is first discussed in relation to contemporary feminist scholarship. The project combined elements of community health nursing practice and feminist research in a support group with Khmer refugee women. The research explored psychosocial adjustment and the construction of gender among Khmer women. Methods of data collection included life history and trauma history interviews, discussion of dream narratives and Cambodian myths, and participant observation. Findings included four recurring themes identified in the women's stories. The research process is discussed in terms of its implications for nursing praxis.