Feminist Research Practice Research Articles

Critical Feminist Epidemiology in Action: Reflections from a Multidisciplinary Partnership Between Mujeres Unidas y Activas and Academic Researchers.

Critical feminist research addresses social inequities, encourages equitable partnerships between researchers and participants, and acknowledges that research can be inherently political. Building upon critical feminist research practices, community-based participatory research, and social and structural epidemiology, we propose the approach of critical feminist epidemiology. A critical feminist epidemiology approach can study community and population health inequities with an eye towards identifying interventions that reduce inequities, through research processes that center the lived experiences of people from minoritized genders. We describe how our interdisciplinary, community-led team used a critical feminist epidemiology approach for an applied public health research project. Mujeres Unidas y Activas, a community organizing non-profit led by and for Latina and Indigenous immigrant women, partnered with academic researchers to conduct community-led research around how their approach to building community power affected the health and wellbeing of organization members and their families. Critical feminist epidemiology is a promising approach for conducting research that is grounded in and relevant to the lives of women and gender expansive people. Building upon social epidemiology and community-based participatory research, critical feminist epidemiology can be a useful research approach to generate novel evidence to inform action towards health equity for communities and populations.

Care ethics and critical friends: feminist research practice as an insider/outsider

Building upon its development in educational scholarship, feminist scholars have incorporated the concept of ‘critical friend’ into their methodologies. Within political science, feminists have articulated critical friendship as relational research praxis, applying the concept to relationships between feminist academics and gender experts in institutions. We bring this research into conversation with feminist care ethics, asking how commitments to care ethics interact with commitments to being a ‘critical friend’ in feminist political science research. Based on interviews with feminist researchers, we argue that care is intrinsic to feminist research and underpins friendship. Whether or not it is explicitly articulated, the concept of ‘critical friend’ carries assumptions about the centrality and practice of care. These findings suggest that feminist scholars need to surface care explicitly in methodological discussions and articulate caring strategies, including self-care. Such surfacing must include acknowledging care as a source of depletion and nourishment, as well as fundamentally political.

Research Responsibility Agreement: a tool to support ethical research

When engaging in community-based research, it is important to consider ethical research practices throughout the project. While current research practices require many investigators to obtain approval from an ethics review board before starting a project, more is required to ensure that ethical principles are applied once the investigations begin and after the investigations are complete. In response to this concern, as expressed by workers at a feminist non-profit during a community placement, we developed a tool to foster both greater ethical and feminist research practice in community-based research. Using feminist theories, methodologies, and concepts such as epistemic justice, epistemic trust, and coauthorship, a tool was developed to support researchers and other collaborators in building relationships of reciprocity. This tool, called the Research Responsibility Agreement (RRA) invites all members of a research project to explicitly reflect on their role in the research, their relationships with other collaborators, their responsibility to contributing meaningfully in the project, and their plans to remain accountable to one another. In doing so, the RRA adds to existing tools that support ethical research by sharing explicit reflections from all collaborators on how to prevent harm and by asking them to reflect on ethical practices beyond the initial stages of the project. The RRA also encourages greater engagement from researchers and collaborators toward building meaningful relationships with each other, and with participants, to work together in advancing social change. As a practical tool that promotes reflection, that builds relationships, and that holds all parties accountable to ethical and feminist research practices, the RRA has the potential to generate impactful change in community-based research projects and beyond. While the RRA is tailored to community-based research, it can be applied widely to any research project and has the potential to revolutionize how research relationships are built across disciplines.

“Testing the Waters” in a “World That Refuses to Make Space: Development and Coming Out with Transgender and Non-Binary Adults

ABSTRACT Transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) adults face structural and interpersonal stigma from their families and society at large when living openly and seeking gender affirming healthcare. To better understand the significance of family and social contexts for shaping the lived experiences of TGNB adults, this phenomenological qualitative study aimed to describe TGNB transgender identity development and coming out processes inclusive of significant past and present experiences. TGNB participants (N = 17) completed a one-time semi-structured interview and member checking of analysis findings. Results identified two themes: 1) TGNB identity development and socially “testing the waters” in gender expression; and 2) coming out when “the world just refuses to make space.” Implications are made for advancing feminist systemic research and clinical practice with TGNB clients.

Academic mothers, professional identity and COVID-19: Feminist reflections on career cycles, progression and practice.

Based on a collection of auto‐ethnographic narratives that reflect our experiences as academic mothers at an Australian university, this paper seeks to illustrate the impact of COVID‐19 on our career cycles in order to explore alternative feminist models of progression and practice in Higher Education. Collectively, we span multiple disciplines, parenting profiles, and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Our narratives (initiated in 2019) explicate four focal points in our careers as a foundation for analyzing self‐definitions of professional identity: pre‐ and post‐maternity career break; and pre‐ and post‐COVID‐19 career. We have modeled this research on a collective feminist research practice that is generative and empowering in terms of self‐reflective models of collaborative research. Considering this practice and these narratives, we argue for a de‐centering of masculinized career cycle patterns and progression pathways both now and beyond COVID‐19. This represents both a challenge to neo‐liberal norms of academic productivity, as well as a call to radically enhance institutional gender equality policies and practice.

Difficult data: reflections on making knowledge claims in a turmoil of competing subjectivities, sensibilities and sensitivities

ABSTRACT Much care has been paid to reflexivity, including considering emotional sensitivities in relation to face-to-face interviews. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of sensitivities on the process of data analysis and the presentation of research findings. This paper focuses on what constitutes ‘the data’ to be analysed, who analyses and interprets the data, what is silenced and what is made public, and what this might mean for feminist research practice in areas considered to be ‘sensitive’. It examines these issues by focusing on research on abortion decision-making in which the views and emotions of the researcher were profoundly challenged by women’s constructions of narratives containing a theme of abortion regret. The paper demonstrates how theoretical perspectives – in this case, feminist standpoint theory – can be used in sensitive research, to allow the researcher to resolve such tensions by providing a means through which greater attention can be paid to the context of participants’ narratives.

Research in forced displacement: guidance for a feminist and decolonial approach

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened inequities and undermined health, human rights, and gender equality for forcibly displaced populations The ongoing pandemic has also exposed persisting power hierarchies between researchers and forcibly displaced populations These populations experience power asymmetries in their position as the so-called beneficiaries of humanitarian research and action, and are often excluded from participation in decision making about the research intended to benefit their communities Forcibly displaced women and girls are consistently categorised as vulnerable and needing protection or rescuing, which takes away their agency and power of action, while risking exploitation or abuse by the same humanitarian actors that supposedly aim to protect them We believe that applying a feminist lens is not merely about demolishing problematic structures, but also about collaboratively building up new ones for a more just world (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

On the politics of discomfort

This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: (1) engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and (2) embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource.

‘This is the plan’: mature women’s vocational education choices and decisions about Honours degrees

ABSTRACT This paper discusses a piece of qualitative research that explored the narratives of a group of mature women when they discussed influences on their post-16 educational decisions. This encompasses their initial vocational education and training (VET) and their choice to study higher education (HE) programmes in England. The research draws on Nancy Fraser’s dual-perspectival notion of social justice to analyse how gender may have affected their educational choices. The research also explores some of the tension experienced in feminist research practice. Data collection was undertaken primarily via semi-structured individual interviews with six female Foundation degree graduates who decided to study an Honours top-up degree. In addition, a research journal was also used to explore a feminist standpoint approach and the research relationships. A thematic analysis of the data found that gender plays a crucial and complicated role in vocational choices. The findings also highlight that although VET is not a second choice, the low pay and misrecognition of ‘pink collar’ work leads the women into HE study. HE is used to gain credibility and employment security. The research concludes that top-up degrees offer the women individualised solutions to the low status and economic precarity vocational education provides.

Feminist Engagements with Transnational Issues and Activism

Feminist Engagements with Transnational Issues and Activism Karen Garner (bio) Sylvanna M. Falcón. Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activism inside the United Nations. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. xiv + 244 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-295-99525-0 (cl); 978-0-295-99526-7 (pb). Kristen Ghodsee. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women's Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. xviii + 306 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4780-0139-3 (cl); 978-1-4780-0181-2 (pb). Katherine M. Marino. Feminism and the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xii + 354 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-4969-6 (cl); 978-1-4696-4970-2 (ebook). Ann Oakley. Women, Peace, and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920. Bristol, UK: Policy Press University of Bristol, 2018. x + 442 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4473-3256-5 (cl); 978-1-4473-3262-6 (pb); 978-1-4473-3260-2 (epub); 978-1-4473-3261-9 (Kindle). These four rich texts shine their bright lights on women and their transnational feminist activist projects spanning the period from the late nineteenth century into the first decade of the twenty-first century. The women, their projects, and their organizations that are the subjects of these studies, as well as the authors who researched and analyzed these endeavors, crossed national, institutional, ideological, disciplinary, and methodological borders, literally and figuratively, in pursuit of feminist, anti-imperialist, antiracist, and humanitarian goals. Each of these thoroughly documented studies, drawing on multinational archival sources and, in all cases but one, on multiple language sources, provide models for state-of-the-art transnational feminist research practices. These studies are not casual inquiries but are the products of their authors' passion projects. They each represent years of careful research into broad and deep bodies of work. Future scholars will use these studies as reference works and will most certainly mine them for source materials as they build their own [End Page 137] work on these strong foundations. While these studies share the qualities mentioned here, they are also unique in the specific topics they address and the scholarly contributions they make. To begin at the chronological beginning and methodologically at the most traditional approach, Ann Oakley's study, Women, Peace, and Welfare: A Suppressed History of Social Reform, 1880–1920, illuminates the lives of well over three hundred (!) Western women and their often-unacknowledged contributions to developing social policy and expanding the field of social science with new theory, data, and research methods during the Progressive Era. Although white, Anglo-American women's leadership in many of the social welfare, labor, peace, and suffrage campaigns underway in Western nations during the Progressive Era may seem like well-trod territory on the surface, the scope of coverage here is impressive, including not-so-well-known biographical details about many individual researchers and reformers. And while it may appear that this work does not fit neatly as a study of transnational feminism, these women from the Global North did not see themselves as saviors of their disadvantaged "sisters" in the Global South. In contrast, the women under study here were trying to save everyone in their own flawed societies and were especially opposed to a hegemonic masculinity that dominated the realms of domestic and foreign policy making and that tried to exclude them from the production of scientific knowledge. These "difficult women" (as their male contemporaries labeled them) were battering the gates of patriarchy with a sense of urgency to reform their flawed societies, as Oakley explains in the first chapter of her text. Her book is an "empirical retrieval" project that is "needed," she argues, "as a corrective to historical amnesia" (5). Oakley also explains her personal reasons for taking on this study in chapter one: her father, Richard Titmuss, became the head of the social welfare academic department at the London School of Economics in 1950, and the personnel changes that he directed swept women from the department ranks and installed male social policy-focused researchers in their places. Even as a child, Oakley recalls, she knew...

The Collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild of the UK: A Critical Review of Its Usages

This position paper aims to bring attention to the unique collection of the Knitting & Crochet Guild (KCG) of the United Kingdom (UK), describing its composition, current and potential uses as a resource for research and study.The article begins by stating its methodological and critical framework: these are informed by feminist research practice, underpinned by soft systems and situational analysis approaches to collecting and analysing data. First, the content of the KCG Collection is outlined as are its location and origins. Second, the current usages of the Collection: its audiences, and the ways in which it is made available to these audiences are described. Finally, a review is made of these interactions and key issues identified.The article describes and evaluates the ways in which the KCG Collection is currently accessed in both ‘real life’ and ‘virtually’. Access to the Collection itself is limited by its location but small groups can be accommodated by appointment. Items are taken out in trunk shows across the UK, and displays mounted at consumer textile events across the UK. Online, the Collection has several locations and the effectiveness of these will be assessed. Audiences for the Collection will be described; these range from University of Huddersfield textile students, to KCG members and other leisure makers and crafters.The Collection can be argued to embody domestic gendered production and to therefore stand as a material record of former economic situations, pre-globalisation, when hand labor at home was a significant provider of clothing and other domestic textiles. The textiles in the Collection are a testimony to the skill and creativity of many women, considered ‘ordinary’, making for family but also, at times, for monetary reward.

A History of the Future: Carolyn Wood Sherif, Equitable Knowledge, and Feminist Psychology

Writing some 40 years ago, Carolyn Wood Sherif left a legacy of critical reflections on the fledgling field of feminist psychology. Here I read her work, not as a record of the past, but with an eye to the future. In the two works I consider in this essay, Sherif offered a scrutiny of the knowledge-producing practices and social relations of the psychology of her time, as well as an agenda for feminist research practice. I draw on Ludwik Fleck’s sociology of science to reflect on Sherif’s thoughts. For Fleck, scientific communities are thought collectives with characteristic styles of thinking that come to seem like objective reality. Sherif took issue with many thought styles of orthodox psychology, particularly the dicta that limited psychological inquiry to narrow space-time frameworks, thus erasing culture, history, and social structure. In addition, Sherif advocated for a critical consciousness of the institutional relations of psychology, in particular the ways that psychology buttressed and was buttressed by the military. Sherif’s concerns remain urgent today. I urge readers to join epistemological debates and boundary-crossing conversations. I also call on readers to join with social critics in examining the discipline’s place as a social institution.

Crank up the Feminism: Poetic Inquiry as Feminist Methodology

In this autoethnographic essay, the author argues for the use of poetic inquiry as a feminist methodology by showing her use of poetry as research method during the past 13 years. Through examples of her poetic inquiry work, the author details how poetry as research offers Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies scholars a means of doing, showing, and teaching embodiment and reflexivity, a way to refuse the mind-body dialectic, a form of feminist ethnography, and a catalyst for social agitation and change. The author uses examples of her ethnographic poetry that critique middle-class White motherhood, address the problems of White feminism, and reflects the nuances of identity negotiation in research and personal life to show the breadth of topics and approaches of poetic inquiry as feminist research practice and feminist pedagogy.

A Compassionate Pursuit of Justice: Towards a Religious Ethics of Care in a Time of Securitisation

Feminist theorizations of care have been central to feminist research practices. Nevertheless, this article argues that feminist theorizations of care have not addressed how a feminist committed to breaking down hierarchies between research participants and herself can carefully study ambiguous activism. By illuminating the similarities, overlaps, and differences between feminist and Islamic theorizations and practices of care and justice, this article forges an ethic of Islamic feminist research practice that supports the author’s investigation of a precarious movement—Iran’s Hezbollah. The article places feminist thought in conversation with the study of gender and religion, which is an urgent interdisciplinary task.

A Compassionate Pursuit of Justice: Towards a Religious Ethics of Care in a Time of Securitisation

Feminist theorizations of care have been central to feminist research practices. Nevertheless, this article argues that feminist theorizations of care have not addressed how a feminist committed to breaking down hierarchies between research participants and herself can carefully study ambiguous activism. By illuminating the similarities, overlaps, and differences between feminist and Islamic theorizations and practices of care and justice, this article forges an ethic of Islamic feminist research practice that supports the author’s investigation of a precarious movement—Iran’s Hezbollah. The article places feminist thought in conversation with the study of gender and religion, which is an urgent interdisciplinary task.

Feminist Research Practices and Digital Archives

ABSTRACTIn this article I reflect on the process of conducting historical research in digital archives from a feminist perspective. After reviewing issues that arose in conjunction with the British Library’s digitisation of the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 2013, I offer three questions researchers should consider before consulting materials in a digital archive. Have the individuals whose work appears in these materials consented to this? Whose labour was used and how is it acknowledged? What absences must be attended to among an abundance of materials? Finally, I suggest that researchers should draw on the existing body of scholarship about these issues by librarians and archivists.

Ethics in Violence and Abuse Research - a Positive Empowerment Approach

Research governance, including research ethics committees and data protection legislation, is invested in protecting the individual rights of participants in social care and health research. Increasingly funders expect evidence of outcomes that engage with ‘service users’, making research critical in supporting social interventions to compete for scant resources in an economic climate marked by ‘austerity’ ( Sullivan 2011 ). This article focuses on the tensions that can arise from the research governance of violence and abuse research. We argue that increased scrutiny of violence and abuse as a ‘sensitive’ topic that involves ‘vulnerable’ groups has made ethical clearance more challenging, which in turn can lead to a dangerous lack of evidence. This can have a harmful impact upon women and children and leave specialised violence and abuse services facing a precarious future. Drawing on recent debates we describe the ‘positive empowerment’ approach used to engage victim-survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence in Project Mirabal. We conclude with recommendations for ethical decision-making in violence and abuse research: (i) to reconsider participants as active agents and stakeholders; (ii) to prioritise the development of skilled researchers; (iii) to develop situated processes of informed consent and confidentiality; and (iv) to continue to discuss and share practical experiences of feminist research practice that seeks to deliver justice and social change.

Toward Authenticity

Scholars suggest we construct stories or narratives to help us create order and rationalize events that are difficult to explain. In contemporary society, journalists serve as mediated storytellers, and one story journalists have told from the perspective of sense-making is that of mothers who kill their children, a crime that can defy understanding. This qualitative textual analysis examines ten cases of maternal infanticide to determine the collective narrative told by journalists, exploring the dialectical and rhetorical functions of narrative. The analysis reveals that the news narrative offers moral lessons about the consequences of maternal incompetence and “inappropriate” feminine sexual behavior. The author questions whether the journalistic paradigm of detachment—traditionally associated with a masculine narrative style—is the best way to tell stories of women's lives and suggests feminist research practices can be used to capture the complexities of mothering work, as well as other complicated situations in women's and men's lives.

Book Review: Marilyn Metta, Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory Lifewriting as Reflexive: Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice

Book Review: Marilyn Metta, <i>Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory Lifewriting as Reflexive: Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice</i>

Nurturing “Critical Hope” in Teaching Feminist Social Work Research

Despite the congruence between critical feminist values and the cardinal values of the social work profession, feminist research in social work has lagged behind its feminist cousins in the social sciences, particularly in terms of critical uses of theory, reflexivity, and the troubling of binaries. This article presents as praxis our reflections as researchers, teachers, and feminists inside social work. We draw from a review of feminist social work research and offer suggestions for teaching critical feminist approaches in social work research. Incorporating critical feminist values and research practices into social work research courses creates the potential for greater integration of research, practice, and the principal values of our profession.