Doing Feminist Research: Theory and Practice
Part of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science’s Spring into Methods programme, the workshop “Feminist Research Methods Across Universities: Research Practice, Process and Power Relations” was organised by Maddie Breeze, Radhika Govinda, Jennifer MacKay and Yvette Taylor and took place on 25-26 April 2024 at the University of Stirling.
Image Caption: Early Career Researcher Panel: Negotiating Power in the Feminist Field (From left to right: Radhika Govinda, Manal Shqair, Aila Spathopoulou, Siqi Zhang, Leah McCabe, Maddie Breeze). Image credit: Strathclyde Feminism
On a sunny day in April, I arrived at the beautiful green campus of the University of Stirling. I expected this to be a nice break from my daily routine at the office.
As a feminist sociologist and first-year PhD student soon to undertake ethnographic fieldwork in Spain, I was interested in learning from more experienced feminist researchers and gaining additional insights, skills and tools to conduct ethical, collaborative, reflexive, and socially engaged research. I already had experience with feminist theories and methodologies, so I went in unsure of being the right audience for the workshop, but it proved to be both a thorough introduction for those less familiar with feminist methods and an enriching experience even for those with prior knowledge. The two-day workshop covered a wide range of topics and approaches to research, addressing issues such as challenging colonial and Western forms of knowledge production, negotiating power dynamics between researchers and participants during fieldwork, disrupting hegemonic practices of citation and translation, and producing knowledge that goes beyond textual form and is accessible to a wide audience. In this blog post, I will briefly discuss the presentations that most resonated with me and my research, presenting key themes and insights.
In her fascinating presentation Disrupting Coloniality, Dr rashné limki explored what I see as one of the main aims of feminist research: how to ask research questions that are not rooted in colonial thought and epistemologies and that disrupt hegemonic ideologies and hierarchies of knowledge. She spoke of the importance of challenging what is considered ‘useful’ research and making space for multiple ways of knowing. Dr Sarah Liu also explored this question in her presentation on feminist quantitative methods, showing that what makes research feminist is not the method used, but rather how it is used and to ask what questions. Questions about why and how we do research as feminist researchers resonated particularly strongly with me. I had been thinking about how to avoid extracting information from my research participants for the benefit of my project and conduct research that would actually be useful to the participants. The panel Negotiating Power in the Feminist Field addressed these issues and highlighted the importance of active listening, open communication, trust, care, and collaboration with research participants, as well as a willingness to reframe research or interview questions based on participant input.
Many other practical ways of disrupting hegemonic forms of knowledge production were explored during the workshop, including citational practices. Dr Lauren Smith explained how citation practices can reproduce or reinforce hierarchies of knowledge (including within gender and sexualities studies), where the most cited authors are often white, English-speaking, and from universities in the ‘Global North’. Citational practices wereof particular interest to me because the academic literature on my research topic is mostly from the United States and/or is Anglocentric, and one of the main goals of my research in Spain is to break the hegemony of U.S. narratives. Building on the work of Sara Ahmed (2017), Dr Lauren Smith argued that ‘citation is feminist memory’ and that by disrupting the North/South divide and the binary between theory and practice or academia and activism, we can create new genealogies of feminist knowledge and theory. As a starting point, she suggested using databases from the ‘Global South’. She also recommended justifying citational practices in our work (i.e., explaining why we have decided to include or exclude certain authors or texts), for example by including a citation diversity statement.
Doing research in a Spanish-speaking country—or, more generally, using non-anglophone sources—inevitably involves the issue of translation, and this topic was explored by Dr Anglea de Britos and Dr Stefania Pigliapoco. One of the ideas they grappled with during their presentation is how the language we use in our research can reproduce categorisations or binary thinking. In the case of my research on sexual violence, this made me think about the terms ‘victims’ and ‘survivors’ and how the term sobreviviente (survivor in Spanish) is not as widespread in Spain, and how this could create difficulties in being faithful to the voices and intentions of my participants while, at the same time, being careful not to reproduce certain categorisations when translating my interviews. Dr Angela de Britos and Dr Stefania Pigliapoco stressed the importance of empowering participants by respecting and adopting their terminology.
María Galindo (2022), a Bolivian feminist activist from whom I draw in my research, boldly argues that a feminist bibliography should not be a list of recommended authors and texts, but a direct, experiential reading of the women in our lives—our mothers, aunts, grandmothers—and the public spaces we inhabit—the streets, markets, public squares, and so on. For me, this denotes the importance of moving beyond academic contexts and textual forms of knowledge production, and this is another theme that was explored during the workshop. Dr Darren Elliott-Smith introduced participants to the artistic method of the video essay, using found footage to reinterpret and queer films; a form of knowledge production he described as a queer feminist practice. Other creative approaches to research were explored during the workshop, including how to be playful with research, for example through non-linear analysis of data and by valuing the research process and not just the results, as well as challenges or failures.
Participating in this workshop not only allowed me to reflect on and explore the different forms my research can take; it also gave me a sense of community that I had been missing since the beginning of my PhD journey. I made connections with feminist researchers of diverse ages, backgrounds, and disciplines, but who all share the same goal of conducting feminist research for social justice.
Author Bio
Maéva Thibeault is a PhD student whose research explores transformative justice as a community-based and survivor-centered approach to sexual violence in the Spanish context. Her research lies at the intersection of criminology, sociology, and gender studies. She is also a Research and Communications Assistant at GENDER.ED.