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

This research tests the spatial mismatch hypothesis by comparing the employment probabilities of central city versus suburban African American males in nine metropolitan areas. Treatment effects models are used to control for the effects of both individual characteristics and residential self-selection on the probability of employment. A positive effect of suburban residential location on employment is found for the residents of Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, while no effect is found for the residents of Cleveland, Houston. Jackson, Memphis, and Newark. The general conclusion to be drawn is that the spatial mismatch effect is contingent on the particular characteristics of each metropolitan area. Preliminary analysis shows that metropolitan areas with a spatial mismatch effect are large in terms of total population and total land area, and have less efficient transportation systems.     

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.     

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.     

Feminist Geopolitics Revisited: Body Counts in Iraq*

Feminist geography and political geography still represent two solitudes within the discipline. While increased traffic between these different parts of the discipline points to a degree of intellectual engagement, there remains a paucity of feminist thought in political geography. This article examines recent scholarship on feminist political geography, with a view to applying its insights to the struggles to protest and end political violence. The concept of feminist geopolitics is employed and recast, both as a bridging concept between feminist and political geography and as an analytical approach that has political valence in the context of the war in Iraq. Feminist geopolitics is revisited in this article, but remains a critical analytic in relation to body counts and other casualties in war zones.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

基于女性主义地理学的消费空间性别关系建构——以西安“世纪金花”购物中心为例

近年来,女性主义地理学的研究内容转向身体、身份认同和象征空间等微观地理,消费空间的性别研究成为关注热点。文章基于女性主义视角,借助对典型消费空间的实证调查,考察空间性别化特征以及性别因素决定下的空间之权力隐喻关系,总结了人—地互动模式中的性别建构特征。研究发现,消费空间为女性提供了参与城市公共空间的场所,见证了女性空间权的觉醒与实践,但女性仍受男性规训与控制;现代女性在消费空间中的行为延续了传统的角色定位,公共空间参与度并未显著改变她们的性别角色和在家务上的性别化分工;消费空间再现和建构的性别关系、性别地位是一种典型的隐形歧视,女性处于实际上的不平等地位。因此,空间和性别不可分割且互为构成,两性在消费空间中的表现实质上是性别权力关系的投射,折射出这一地理空间中两性的宰控关系。     

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.     

The Geography of Education and the Education of Geography: Agricultural Extension and the Political Ecology of Education

The spatial nature of learning is increasingly a focus of geographic inquiry. I argue that the spatiality of education, which is where formal learning occurs, has the potential to shape students’ spatial imaginaries. I analyze the role the spatiality of agronomic education plays in the historical construction of the social and physical landscape in southeastern Pará, Brazil. In opposing ways, the first Green Revolution, and agrarian social movements’ more recent agroecological Green Revolution are found to structure agronomic education and spatial imaginaries. The perspectives of agricultural extension agents trained in traditional agronomic programs are compared with teachers from an agroecological school located in an Amazonian agrarian reform settlement of Brazil's Landless Workers’ Movement. I collected these data over 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork. To analyze these data, I employ a political ecology of education perspective, which highlights how education and political economy interact to mediate relations with, access to, and contestations over natural resources. The geography of education and the education of geography exist in a complicated feedback cycle: Education is not neutral but ideologically charged and affects conceptions of productive landscapes, providing students intellectual and economic power to put their visions of landscape into effect.     

Negotiating Knowledge Production: The Everyday Inclusions,Exclusions, and Contradictions of Participatory GIS Research*

Although participatory approaches to geographic information system (GIS) use have significantly altered the technological and social practices of GIS‐based research and decision making, they have received relatively little attention within discussions of participatory research. This paper examines how participation and representation are negotiated in participatory GIS research through everyday practices of knowledge production. Inclusion and exclusion in the production of knowledge in participatory GIS are mediated within several intersecting arenas of research practice simultaneously, often with contradictory implications, priorities, and outputs.     

Painting Pictures of Ourselves: Researcher Subjectivity in the Practice of Feminist Reflexivity

In this article, I argue that researchers need to carefully distinguish the concepts of subjectivity and positionality in feminist reflexive practice, as an explicit focus on researcher subjectivity has the potential to provide additional insights into the research process that go beyond a focus on relational positionality. Drawing on examples from my own research, I argue that examining one's subjectivity as a researcher opens up a consideration of emotional reactions to research; lets us reconsider the importance of feelings of (dis)affiliation and (dis)comfort in the research process; and helps us to recognize that the dreams and desires of researchers about themselves and their research participants can play an important role in the research process. Moreover, researcher subjectivity attunes us to ways in which our subjectivities shift through the research process and are intimately connected to and mediated by the process of research and our interactions with our research participants.     

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.     

Growing Political: Violence,Community Forestry,and Environmental Defender Subjectivity

Why do environmental defenders continue to participate in community-based efforts to protect the environment despite threats to their lives and minimal success in deterring or punishing offenders? Examining Community Forestry initiatives in Cambodia, we find that forest protection is not only a means to gain environmental, economic, or social benefits, but also a means for forest defenders to assert themselves as political actors in relation to the state and other citizens. Rather than simply repressing and disciplining forest dwelling populations, violence against defenders shapes their subjectivity and re-politicizes their lives. Distinguishing between various forms of violence associated with different illicit forest users, we highlight how forest protection becomes a means of political self-expression and rights-based resistance as forest defenders reinterpret direct violence through experiences and understandings of structural and symbolic violence. Participation in CF thus unlocks ways of being political and contesting oppressive structures while acting within sanctioned institutions.     

Forest Transitions in Mexico: Institutions and Forests in a Globalized Countryside*

Forest‐transition theory suggests that economic development eventually leads to forest recovery, but there is great uncertainty about the existence, the characteristics, and the mechanisms of forest transitions that might be occurring under current socioeconomic conditions. A case study in a small region of highland Mexico finds agricultural abandonment and forest regeneration, but also forest degradation due to woodcutting. A discussion locates those findings in the international political economy of agriculture and emigration in Mexico, which are substantially different from the conditions associated with forest recovery in developed countries. Although regional forest transitions are possible in marginal agricultural areas such as that studied here, their environmental implications depend on the evolution of social institutions coordinating rural people's environmental actions.     

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.     

Political Ecologies of Dynamic Wetlands: Hydrosocial Waterscapes in the Okavango Delta

Research within geography and related disciplines has directed much attention to the coupled interactions between social and ecological systems. These studies have usefully analyzed the multifaceted, temporal, and scalar dimensions of human–environment interactions and how future environmental change will continue to challenge human resource needs. Political ecology research has also made contributions in this regard, particularly by emphasizing livelihood systems, impacts of conservation and development, agricultural production, and environmental governance. Yet although political ecology research has contributed to socioecological systems scholarship, much of this work has been situated within dryland environments or marine ecosystems that have particular biophysical features. Comparatively, wetland environments that experience dynamic flooding regimes warrant further attention from political ecology. This article engages with the findings from an ongoing research project that is evaluating the impacts of flooding variability for rural livelihoods in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. We outline some of the main findings from this work by concentrating on two themes central to political ecology: access and governance. We conclude by arguing that the Okavango Delta should be understood as a hydrosocial waterscape that encompasses a variety of socioecological relationships within the region, as well as the power relations operating at a variety of scales that both produce and govern them.     

“Is It Really Safe? That's What We Want to Know”: Science,Stories, and Dangerous Places*

This article presents a case study of risk perception and decision making regarding the former nuclear test site of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. This example demonstrates how people use combinations of scientific and anecdotal evidence to consider whether places are “really safe.” Furthermore, the article examines how scientific studies of risk operate as cultural systems and how a lack of dialogue and understanding across cultural systems can confuse discussions about risk and affect the development of places. The study is based on interviews with still‐exiled Bikinians as well as with workers and visitors on Bikini Atoll.     

Interviews and Questionnaires as Mixed Methods in Population Geography: TheCase of Lone Fathers in Newcastle,Australia

A mixed method approach was adopted to study the experiences of lonefathers, using a classic triangulation approach of interview and questionnaire data. This study utilised an empirical realist framework of scientific enquiry, with the ‘soft’ individual interview data seen as an adjunct to the ‘hard’ aggregate quantitative methods. A review of this study found that the interviews worked well as a pilot study in a classic mixed methods framework. The questionnaires provided a range of information about thecharacteristics of this group of lone fathers, but it was the interviews which provided astonishing depth on the causes of marital breakdown and post-marital conflict, and on the discourses and other structures which sustain social processes. In this study, the interview techniques could have been used differently, in a different framework of analysis (that of critical rather than empirical realism) without the support of other mixed methods.