Introduction to Focus Section: Feminist Research and Knowledge Production in Geography

Over the past two decades, feminist geographers have contributed in critical ways to thinking on the conduct, complications, and consequences of feminist research. The robust existing body of work is testament to the foundational import of these contributions, but the articles in this Focus Section suggest that there are still important things to argue, talk about, and reflect on with regard to the epistemological aspects of doing feminist geography. These six articles bring together real-life examples of complex issues that feminist researchers in geography face today, with the overarching aim of sparking discussions about the relationship between feminist research and knowledge production. Specifically, the articles expand key concepts facilitating reflexive processes and offer new tools for feminist researchers. This Introduction reviews the existing literature pertaining to both of these goals, and summarizes and situates the articles that follow.     

Getting Personal: Reflexivity,Positionality, and Feminist Research*

Feminist and poststructural challenges to objectivist social science demand greater reflection by the researcher with the aim of producing more inclusive methods sensitive to the power relations in fieldwork. Following a discussion of contrasting approaches to these power relations, I present a reflexive examination of a research project on sexual identities. My reflections highlight some of the key ethical questions that face researchers conducting fieldwork, especially with regard to the relationship between the researcher and those being researched. My discussion of these dilemmas reflect the situated and partial nature of our understanding of “others.” I argue that the researcher's positionality and biography directly affect fieldwork and that fieldwork is a dialogical process which is structured by the researcher and the participants.     

Troubling Positionality: Politics of “Studying Up” in Transnational Contexts

Drawing on research conducted in India's software industry in Bangalore, this article explores the multiple positionalities of differently situated people in the project—state officials, software firm managers and owners, software professionals, and researcher as critic. Challenging conventional notions of positionality centered on individual scholars' negotiations of their own identities, I trace the institutional, geopolitical, and social relations within which all participants are embedded. I argue that moments of tension and uncertainty are not just symbolic of multiple positionalities of both researcher and researched but also indicate the fraught nature of information technology–led development in neoliberal India. This article thus provides a particular opportunity to trouble notions of power, positionality, reflexivity, and feminist commitment to untangling the politics of knowledge production while “studying up” in transnational contexts.     

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.     

The Feminist Geographer as Killjoy: Excavating Gendered Urban Power Relations

In this article, I place Ahmed's notion of the feminist killjoy into conversation with feminist geography literature to explore possibilities and praxis in research endeavoring to illuminate uneven power relations and the moral orders that frame them. According to Ahmed, a feminist killjoy is one who exposes sexism, heterosexism, and racism, only to be criticized for disrupting happiness and social consent. Drawing on fieldwork on urban politics and development, I explore the implications—both promise and peril—of adopting feminist killjoy research subjectivities, emphasizing the important role of affect. I suggest that when feminist researchers direct killjoy research not just at mainstream institutions but also at progressive endeavors, they risk being construed as double killjoys who disrupt supposed joy and solidarity within progressive politics.     

Women in the Field: Critical Feminist Methodologies and Theoretical Perspectives*

Feminist scholars have traditionally emphasized the importance of incorporating “the everyday” worlds of women into the historically masculinist theoretical and empirical foundations of the social sciences. Such emphases have commonly resulted in smaller-scale research projects and more interactive kinds of research methods and methodologies. Feminist geographers have uniquely contributed to the body of feminist scholarship through drawing out the importance of place in everyday constructions of gender and, more recently, sexuality. Critical field-based research has therefore from the beginning been the mainstay of subdisciplinary research. Like the discipline as a whole, however, little explicit attention has been given in publications or pedagogically to the politics of fieldwork (including how a “field” is defined and the politics involved in choosing and working in a particular “field”) or the politics of representation (which includes considerations of the partiality of knowledge and how and to whom we represent our work, ourselves and others in various kinds of texts). These “Opening Remarks” show how these issues are addressed in the papers that follow and how feminist geography has much to contribute to critical analyses of global and multinational processes, including patriarchy, capitalism, and racism.     

Research Associates and the Production of Knowledge in the Field

This article introduces an important, but overlooked, actor—the research associate—into methodological discussions about the production of knowledge. We use the term research associate (rather than assistant) to encompass the individuals on whom researchers rely while conducting fieldwork. We seek to avoid the unidirectional hierarchy and power dynamics between researchers and associates, which place the researcher as expert and knowledge producer while obscuring the diversity of roles conducted by field associates. Therefore, throughout this article we examine and destabilize power dynamics and hierarchies and widen the range of what is considered research assistance in the coproduction of knowledge. We also highlight the ways in which geopolitics are written into encounters with ourselves and research associates, encounters that render and reveal the complexities of vulnerability and bodily risk in fieldwork. The goals of this article are threefold: to (1) introduce the influential role of research associates during the production and dissemination of knowledge, (2) situate the work of research associates in both fieldwork and methodological literature, and (3) problematize the invisibility of research associates in academic publications and discuss possible alternatives to how authorship is credited.     

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.     

Positionality and Praxis: Fieldwork Experiences in Rural India

This paper provides a reflexive account of conducting fieldwork as a graduate student in the Sunderban area of West Bengal state, India, in the mid‐1990s. Reflecting on my personal experiences of research in a setting that was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I use frames of positionality to understand the impact of explicit and implied power structures on the research process, the relationships between the researcher and those researched, and the transfer of knowledge. This paper argues that the multiple subject positions and identities of both scholar and subjects as presented in the field vary with setting, and that these positionalities affect access to informants, the tenor and outcomes of encounters, and knowledge production. While self‐reflexivity is endorsed as a strategy for critically informed research, active measures such as openness about the agenda and activities undertaken, self‐disclosure, making conscious accommodations for the research subject's work schedule and time constraints, mutual sharing of information, and explicit recognition of the research subjects' expertise through lived experiences are proposed as strategies for equalising the power balance between scholar and subject.     

“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.”     

Under the Microscope: Fieldwork Practice and Cuba's Biotechnology Industry: A Reflexive Affair?

Through a re‐reading of my Ph.D. fieldwork on Cuba's biotechnology industry, I empirically pull apart the relationship between fieldwork practice and knowledge production as experienced in my research. I argue that reflexivity is an insufficiently critiqued concept and, as a result, that its widespread influence in contemporary fieldwork practice works to obscure the influence of “others”, not just on the “doing” of research but on the conceptual development of the methodology itself. I make this argument by focusing on the various strategies I employed to actualise my research methodology, the problems I met with and the subsequent pull of my research in new directions. I cover such issues as gaining access, working in multiple locales across antagonistic polities, what happens when fieldwork goes wrong and the notion of “empirical drift”. I use these issues to examine how I was actively constructing both my field and my research methodology at the same time and through others. I try to show how the fact that fieldwork can be simultaneously a lived experience, a socially constructed performance and an episteme accounts for much of its distinctive qualities as a milieu in which existing knowledge is put to the test, or added to. I argue that these same qualities allow it to be a deeply intertextual process, or a joint work between the researcher and the field. This, I suggest, warrants greater recognition.     

Collaborating in the field, working for change: Reflecting on partnerships between academics, development organizations and rural communities in Africa

Academics and development organizations approach fieldwork with somewhat different motivations, constraints and challenges. In many instances, fieldwork might be improved if greater collaboration occurred between these two parties. Rural communities are also important yet frequently taken for granted partners in the research process that deserve greater respect. This paper explores and describes the real and imagined impediments to greater collaboration between academics, development organizations and rural communities. The findings are based on 18 years of working with rural communities in Africa, both as a development practitioner and academic researcher. This reflection makes three contributions to the broader literature on fieldwork. First, it explicitly links two ongoing discussions, one on relationships with institutional partners, the other on interactions with rural communities. Second, it articulates the concerns of development organizations in their partnerships with academic researchers, a perspective rarely heard in a literature dominated by academic voices. Third, while feminist scholarship on fieldwork methods often wrestles with issues of positionality and engagement at the scale of the individual researcher, this reflection is aimed at the broader scale of the professional (academic and practitioner) communities involved in development praxis and scholarship.     

GATEKEEPERS AND KEYMASTERS: DYNAMIC RELATIONSHIPS OF ACCESS IN GEOGRAPHICAL FIELDWORK*

ABSTRACT. This article contributes to a recent and growing body of literature exploring the nature of fieldwork in human geography. Specifically, we critically examine the role of gatekeepers in providing access to “the field,” based on existing conceptualizations of gatekeepers in the literature and on our own experiences with gatekeepers. We argue that the concept of gatekeepers has been oversimplified, in that relationships between researchers and gatekeepers are often assumed to be unidirectional—with gatekeepers controlling or providing access by researchers—and predominantly static in form and time. Although we accept the necessity and advantages of working through gatekeepers, our experiences suggest that relationships with them are highly complex and evolve over time, with sometimes unexpected implications for research. In gathering and analyzing data, researchers become gatekeepers themselves, what we are calling “keymasters.” Reconceptualizing the gatekeeper‐researcher relationship will contribute to ongoing efforts to more fully understand field‐workers as undertaking a practice inherently political, personal, and linked to the production of knowledge.     

Embeddedness in Practice,Numbers in Context: The Politics of Knowing and Doing*

In this paper, I argue that feminist geographers need to scrutinize the claims being made by the three identifiable epistemological orientations in feminist geography regarding the use of numbers, for each offers a different view of objectivity and a different way to count. I go on to pursue a refinement of a critical feminist epistemology grounded in a mediated objectivity, one located in the embeddedness of everyday life. Within this framework, I suggest that numbers are useful, but only in context.     

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.     

Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography

Many questions-practical, strategic, political, ethical, personal-are raised by conducting field research. Some of these seem, or are constituted as, separate from the “research itself,” yet are integral to it. In this paper I attempt to cut through the breach that divides the doing of fieldwork and the fieldwork itself by addressing what constitutes the “field,” what constitutes a field researcher, and what constitutes data under contemporary conditions of globalization. Drawing on my work in New York City and Sudan, I argue that by interrogating the multiple positionings of intellectuals and the means by which knowledge is produced and exchanged, field researchers and those with whom they work can find common ground to construct a politics of engagement that does not compartmentalize social actors along solitary axes.     

Conflating Privilege and Vulnerability: A Reflexive Analysis of Emotions and Positionality in Postgraduate Fieldwork

Grounded in a self-reflexive, intersectional analysis of positionality, we examine emotions in fieldwork through the autobiographical accounts that we gathered during our postgraduate ethnographic research in the Global South. We show how we, two female early-career geographers, emotionally coped with instances that put us in a vulnerable position due to loneliness, commitment to the field, insistent questioning, violence, and violent threats. We argue that a culture of silence surrounding fieldwork difficulties and their emotional consequences tend to permeate our discipline. We contend that geography departments ought to provide mentorship that takes into account doctoral candidates' different positionalities, conflated vulnerability and privilege, and embodied intersectional axes. This renewed awareness will help not only to reveal possible risks and challenges connected with fieldwork but also ultimately to enrich the overall academic discussions within our discipline.     

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.     

The Politics of Difference: Examining the Quantitative/Qualitative Dualism in Post-Structuralist Feminist Research*

The potential for using quantitative techniques in feminist post-structuralist research has been obscured by the pervasiveness of the quantitative/qualitative dualism within the discipline. In this paper I discuss the possibility that quantitative approaches may be uncoupled from masculinist versions of science in ways that are consistent with the goals of feminist post-structuralist research. To illustrate these ideas, I explore the politics of counting—both the political power of statistical representations of oppression and also the role of counting in revealing the operation of power relations. My examinations of the persistence of the quantitative/qualitative dualism—despite the potential power of quantitative approaches in feminist work—raise questions about how our academic biographies reinforce these ontological divisions. Specifically, I raise questions about the influence of our academic socialization on our engagement with the particular ontologies we employ and (perhaps) reject.     

Discourses of regeneration in early twentieth-century Britain: from Bedlam to the Imperial War Museum

This article calls for greater attention to be paid to the way that sex and sexuality impact on geographical fieldwork. By concentrating in particular on cross–cultural fieldwork, the article focuses on the ways in which attention to these questions has the potential to bring about greater self–reflexivity and to expose the contingency of the researcher's sexuality.