Periscoping as a Feminist Methodological Approach for Researching the Seemingly Hidden

This article proposes the metaphor of the periscope to guide an innovative approach to researching topics obstructed from view or out of range of more traditional approaches. Periscoping, it suggests, combines a feminist focus on the everyday with the recognition that no space, even those intentionally obscured, can be fully contained. Drawing on research on U.S. immigration enforcement policies, the article explores how feminist geographers can think creatively about how to arrange the “prisms” and “mirrors” at their disposal to obtain an image of what was previously thought to be unknowable. It then explores potential problems inherent to a periscopic strategy alongside tools it offers to researchers.     

女性主义地理学研究进展与展望

随着社会的进步与发展,教育、经济等资源配置更加趋向于性别平衡,女性地位不断提升,女性群体开始逐步受到各界学者的广泛关注,女性主义地理学也成为地理学中一个新兴的研究热点。本研究采用知识图谱分析和传统文献研究相结合的方法,借助CiteSpace软件通过知识图谱分析了1978—2018年间女性主义地理学研究的关键词与不同阶段的研究主题,归纳了当前女性主义地理学研究的重点,提出了中国女性主义地理学研究的框架和未来研究方向。研究结果表明：①女性主义地理学逐渐进入大众视野并具有明显的跨学科特点,其研究在不同时期以不同主题为研究重点,整体来看阶段性特征比较突出;②研究主题上,目前国内女性主义地理学主要围绕五大主题展开,但研究的广度和深度仍待进一步加强;③研究视角上,西方更注重女性在空间中的情感体验,国内则更关注由于女性角色的不同而形成的时空行为模式。今后,女性主义地理学研究应进一步革新数据获取方式,对多元化研究主体给予更多学术关注。     

Voice Under Scrutiny: Feminist Methods,Anticolonial Responses,and New Methodological Tools

“Giving voice” to participants has been an important element of qualitative feminist research projects in geography. In this article, I explore scholarship that has questioned qualitative research's reliance on voice, arguing that implicit connections between voice, authenticity, and empowerment are beginning to be unpacked, particularly by scholars engaged in anticolonial work. I draw on anticolonial scholarship to build on and extend feminist debates centered on voice and participation. Feminist attention to voice must be situated within the colonial frameworks and histories of social science research. Scholarship focused on ongoing settler colonial relationships highlights methods both for cautiously proceeding with and consciously refusing incorporating voice within qualitative research. I draw on anticolonial approaches to frame research decisions, voice, and the ethical and methodological dilemmas of its use.     

What is urban about critical urban theory?

This essay takes as its provocation a question posed by the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser: “What’s Critical about Critical Theory?” In urban studies, this question has been usefully reframed by Neil Brenner to consider what is critical about critical urban theory. This essay discusses how the “urban” is currently being conceptualized in various worlds of urban studies and what this might mean for the urban question of the current historical conjuncture. Launched from places on the map that are forms of urban government but that have distinctive agrarian histories and rural presents, the essay foregrounds the undecidability of the urban, be it geographies of urbanization or urban politics. What is at stake is a critical urban theory attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituting process of global political economy and deconstruction as a methodology of generalization and theorization.     

西方女性地理学的发展与启示

西方女性地理学源自对地理学研究中忽视女性独特经验的性别主义取向以及对学科中缺少女性参与的双重不满而兴起的，大致经历了初始阶段、蓬勃发展阶段和更加多元化3个发展阶段共30余年的发展历史，并逐步走向了成熟。它着眼于女性不同于男性的独特经验及女性内部间的差异性，提供了以女性主义的视角来分析研究问题的新的发展领域。改革开放以来，由于单位制的解体，中国女性的整体地位不升反降，女性问题日益成为学者们研究的热点。女性地理学无论是对中国地理学的发展还是对女性问题的研究都有重大的启示作用，理应加以重视并作更深入的研究。     

On the politics of recognition in critical urban scholarship

In this response to Ananya Roy’s plenary talk at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in 2015, “What’s urban about critical urban theory,” I engage the work of Nancy Fraser and feminist epistemologists to argue for the necessity of a robust critical politics of recognition in knowledge projects with emancipatory aims. I question the political utility and empirical accuracy of the increasingly popular assertion that there is no analytical outside to the category “urban,” and argue, like many feminist, post-colonial, and anti-racist scholars before me, that attempts to construct a totalizing political subject have the effect of reproducing cultural misrecognition and are thus incompatible with emancipatory politics.     

The Potential for Mixed Methods: Results from the Field in Urban South Africa

With the “cultural turn” in geography, scholars have become more focused on the politics of representation, politics of fieldwork, and politics of the research setting. In human geography, this epistemological shift has been accompanied by a methodological move toward intensive methods at the expense of extensive methods. In this article, I suggest that mixed methods that utilize the strengths of both intensive and extensive methods can offset the weaknesses of each method. Moreover, results from the field suggest that the combination of intensive and extensive methods could produce unique insights only possible from a mixed method approach.     

A New Delhi every day: multiplicities of governance regimes in a transforming metropolis

In this article I demonstrate the coexistence of multiple urban governance regimes in Delhi, India. While formal urban governance is geared toward transforming Delhi into a “world-class” city, I present original research that shows how the everyday governance of urban space in three very different areas of Delhi is determined by relations among non-state actors. These regimes foster access to space for street hawkers on an everyday basis while they allow powerful local interest groups to collect rent and influence flows of people and commodities. I argue that, in contrast to formal electoral politics, these governance regimes emerge from a parallel politics of everyday interactions, negotiations, and transgressions. Although the emancipatory potential of these regimes should not be overstated, they do offer street hawkers limited contingency to improve their access to urban space. This article contributes to a growing body of work on urban governance by showing how multiplicities of governance regimes coexist and determine how and by whom urban space is used in a metropolis in the global South.     

The Politics of Location: Doing Feminist Research at “Home”*

Feminist research methodologies have many advantages over more traditional positivist methodologies. Feminist research is differentiated from nonfeminist research in terms of its critiques of universality and objectivity and its emancipatory purpose. Drawing on my own research on the survival strategies of low-waged women workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, I argue that we need to examine more critically our feminist research methods in terms of the unequal power relationships on which the research process necessarily rests.     

新时代面向美好生活的日常生活地理与城乡休闲——“生活地理与城乡休闲”专栏解读

随着西方学界“日常生活”的兴起与转向,“回归生活世界”与生活本体论成为人文地理学研究的新视角。新时代背景下,中国社会主要矛盾的转化催生地理学人地关系的转变,由静止的、同质的人地关系转变为动态的、异质的人地互动关系,“人”与“地”被赋予日常生活的内涵与外延,“闲暇处才是生活”。在追求美好生活的新时代,地理学需要回答日常生活地理以及休闲具有哪些地理特征,不同主体如何通过日常生活及休闲展演人与地、人与人、人与自我的动态关系,从而建构不同空间尺度的生活实践与地方意义等问题。本专栏主要探讨日常生活及休闲中所展演的主体能动性、空间异质性以及人地互动的复杂性,涉及城市居民的生活休闲与主观幸福感、城市公共空间活力评价以及休闲方式、日常生活中的地方情感与定居意愿等内容,以期尝试用中国本土的实证来回应西方日常生活地理学的研究。期待未来的相关研究能够更加关注边缘群体的日常生活及其休闲,能够弥补城乡休闲中“乡”尺度的不足,能够全面系统地阐述日常生活与休闲在时间演变过程中的变化规律及其机制。专栏旨在推动中国情境的日常生活地理学的理论建构,在实践上以期为新时代美好生活的具体践行贡献地理智慧。     

Maps,Numbers, Text,and Context: Mixing Methods in Feminist Political Ecology*

Feminist post-structuralist theory, feminist empiricism, and field practice can all contribute to insights on the value of quantitative and qualitative methods in feminist geographical research. A political ecology study of gendered interests in a social forestry program in the Dominican Republic illustrates the methodological dilemmas and potentials of feminist research on environmental change. The study combined qualitative and quantitative data collection and analytical techniques. Examples from the case study address three methodological questions in feminist geography: (1) Should identity or affinity be the basis for situating ourselves and the subjects of our research? (2) How can we reconcile multiple subjectivities and quantitative methods in the quest for objectivity? and (3) Can we combine traditional positivist methods with participatory mapping and oral histories? The paper draws on theoretical literature as well as field experience to answer these questions.     

Emerging Asias: Transnational Forces,Developmental States,and “Asian Values”

Discussions of East Asian developmental states and Asian values discourse have been deformed by national-territorial frameworks that limit scholars' ability to highlight transnational phenomena. Such limits can be overcome by adopting a “Pacificist” perspective, one that highlights the transnational collaborative efforts of Pacific ruling class members, from both Asia and the United States. Such a Pacificist approach has the virtue of highlighting phenomena of transnational class formation that help account for the emergence of both developmental states in East Asia and Asian values discourse, and it also suggested the importance of attending to other kinds of emerging actors in Asian development politics, such as labor and democracy movements.     

Negotiating Expectations in the Field: Gatekeepers, Research Fatigue and Cultural Biases

This paper considers disjunctures between my expectations and experience of doing dissertation fieldwork, which I conducted in Benin between the autumns of 1997 and 1998. The research examined the nature of women's livelihood strategies and their associated outcomes in terms of material well‐being. I now believe that my feminist worldview, and my growing exhaustion as the project progressed, resulted in my minimising the importance of key aspects of fieldwork in an African context. Specifically, I downplayed the importance of negotiating with male “gatekeepers” in gaining access to the women with whom I wanted to work. While most of the time I was able to manage this well enough, one day, in particular, stands out as a time when I handled these negotiations very poorly. This paper compares the experiences of that day with another much more productive and fruitful one to examine how and why expectations and experience can diverge. A consideration of some of the issues that resulted in the “lost day” might prove instructive for other researchers.     

Urban resilience for whom,what, when,where, and why?

ABSTRACT

In academic and policy discourse, the concept of urban resilience is proliferating. Social theorists, especially human geographers, have rightfully criticized that the underlying politics of resilience have been ignored and stress the importance of asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom?” This paper calls for careful consideration of not just resilience for whom and what, but also where, when, and why. A three-phase process is introduced to enable these “five Ws” to be negotiated collectively and to engender critical reflection on the politics of urban resilience as plans, initiatives, and projects are conceived, discussed, and implemented. Deployed through the hypothetical case of green infrastructure in Los Angeles, the paper concludes by illustrating how resilience planning trade-offs and decisions affect outcomes over space and time, often with significant implications for equity.     

“Doing Good Work”: Feminist Dilemmas of Volunteering in the Field

In this article, I argue that there is a need to examine the feminist ethics of volunteering in the field, specifically as it relates to issues of positionality, power and reciprocity, and participatory methods. Reflecting on dilemmas I experienced as a volunteer with the Girl Scouts of San Diego while conducting research on their annual Girl Scout cookie sale, I debate the relationship between volunteerism and fieldwork more broadly and question the effectiveness of volunteerism within a feminist geographic methodological framework. In light of the dilemmas that arose in the field as a volunteer and researcher, I question whether we can consider volunteering as “good work.”     

Not In The Same World: Topological Youths,Topographical Policies

Public attitudes continue to portray youths in Western societies as being passive and disengaged. Critical scholars are largely unanimous in that the misrecognition of and disrespect for young people's everyday experiences and activities form a major reason why they appear detached from politics and public life. Contributing to this debate, this paper traces the everyday experiences of some Finnish urban youths, and argues that their lived worlds differ notably from the worlds of the public administration that seeks to address youths as active citizens. Based on these findings, the paper proposes the pragmatically oriented concepts of “issue publics” and “topological connectives” for rethinking youth participation and democratic life more broadly.     

Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race,” and the Politics of Fieldwork

My experiences combining research and activism within the Japanese-Canadian community reflect a growing concern among feminist and anti-racist scholars with the politics of work among people marginalized by racism and sexism. This concern arises within a context where “other voices” are being heard, but the legitimacy of one individual or group to represent another is being challenged. Such challenges require that essentialism and naturalism be addressed politically and theoretically, a difficult irony given the need to utilize essentialist categories to address the oppressive conditions under which they emerged. To do so, a critical theory of political construction is required.     

Far from Being "Home Alone": The Dynamics of Accompanied Fieldwork

Despite persistent images to the contrary, most fieldworkers are accompanied. Yet, there has been limited discussion on the nature of accompanied fieldwork, particularly by geographers. Drawing on our experiences in three countries in the tropics, we discuss the dynamics of being accompanied in “the field” by our children and female co‐researchers. Specifically, we focus on issues of access and rapport; the impacts of their presence on our positionality; and the implications these have for power relations and research outcomes. We demonstrate how being accompanied entangles our personal and professional selves and can result in more egalitarian power relations as we become “observers observed”. We argue that by paying attention to the dynamics of accompanied fieldwork, there is the potential to enhance the conceptual focus of our methodological concerns and to provide a more theoretically sophisticated mode of exploring the ways in which our multiple identities intersect while in “the field”.     

From Shiny Shoes to Muddy Reality: Understanding How Meso-State Actors Negotiate the Implementation Gap in Participatory Forest Management

Recent research on participatory forest management (PFM) in the global south has highlighted the existence of a widespread “implementation gap” between the ambitious intent enshrined in legislation and the often partial, disappointing rollout of devolved forest governance on the ground. Here, through an ethnographic case study of forest officers (FOs) in Kenya, we draw on a framework of critical institutionalism to examine how key meso-level actors, or “interface bureaucrats,” negotiate and challenge this implementation gap in everyday forest governance. We go beyond consideration of institutional bricolage in isolation or as an aggregate category, to analyze how bricolage as aggregation, alteration, and/or articulation is variously driven, shaped, and constrained by FOs’ multiple accountabilities and agency. Our analysis highlights the locally specific, contingent, and mutually reinforcing nature of accountability, agency and bricolage, and their explanatory power in relation to the performance and nature of “actually existing” PFM.     

Gendering Marine Conservation: The Politics of Marine Protected Areas and Fisheries Access

Drawing on ethnographic case studies from Madagascar, this research shows that multiple marine conservation projects have institutionalized inequitable access to marine recourses along gendered lines. Despite discursive and institutional shifts toward more “collaborative” and “community-based” conservation programing, there is a deficiency of women’s nominal as well as effective participation in community management organizations. This research shows that conservation organizations’ focus on proximate drivers of marine resource use, or a politics of picking the “low-hanging fruit,” over ultimate drivers such as global commodity chains, places disproportionate emphasis on marine spatial enclosures and restricting specific, and gendered, harvest methods. To address gender bias concerning access to and control over natural resources, we must go beyond the rhetoric of “community involvement” to address gendered inequalities in conservation decision making, and whose interests are served by conservation projects.