Deadline extended! CfP IGU Krakow 18-22 August 2014: Feminist participative methodologies: creating spaces of inclusion?

REMINDER
Deadline extended until the 27^th January! 

IGU Regional Conference, Krakow, Poland

CHANGES, CHALLENGES, RESPONSIBILITIES

18-22 August 2014

The Gender and Geography Commission is organizing nine paper sessions (see below for the descriptions) at the IGU Regional Conference in Krakow, Poland, 18-22 August 2014.  We would like to invite you to submit your abstracts (maximum: 500 words) on-line by Wednesday, 15 January 2014 at http://www.igu2014.org/index.php?page=call_for_papers.

(Note: Registration for the conference is required before you can submit your abstract on-line, but you only need to pay registration fees after you have been notified in mid-February as to whether your abstract has been submitted.  Information on travel grants is found at the end of this email.)

Important dates:

15 January 2014 - Deadline for submitting abstracts

25 February 2014 - Notification of results of abstract reviews

2 April 2014 - Deadline for early registration fee payment

15 May 2014 - Deadline for regular registration fee payment

If you plan to submit an abstract for (or have questions on) a specific session, please contact the respective session organizers directly. 

Feminist Participatory Methodologies: Creating Spaces of Inclusion?

Organized by Martina Angela Caretta (Martina@humangeo.su.se) and Yvonne Riaño (riano@giub.unibe.ch)

Feminist epistemology rejects the methodological ideals of objectivity and value-neutrality as one´s own experience and understandings can never be replicated (Colls 2012; Code 2006). Moreover, it claims that established theories of knowledge have perpetuated power asymmetries within science by according epistemic authority to privileged men´s experiences, which have been considered to be implicitly generalizable (Code 2006; Cope 2002).  Consequently, feminist epistemology aims to subvert the power-loaded relationship between the researcher and "the researched" and to let the voice of the research participants be heard through their participation in the research process as well as in the final texts and data produced. Despite an intense theoretical discussion on these issues we have fewer discussions so far on how to operationalize the former principles in our own research. How do we carry out a socially responsible research that aims at "investigating with the participants rather than about the research subjects" (Riaño 2012)? What forms of inclusionary spaces can be created to co-produce knowledge with the research participants? And how do we account for “the feminist imperative to form connections between personal accounts and theoretical discourse” (Kannen 2012:3)? These are crucial challenges for contemporary geographers that we would like to address in our session.

This session invites interventions and reflections on feminist participatory methodologies as possible tools to improve trustworthiness, mutual learning, transferability and confirmability of studies, giving “an accurate reflection of reality (or at least, participants ‘construction of reality)” (Cho and Trent 2006: 322) while at the sam time facilitating a less hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the research participants (Maynard 1994). 

In this spirit, we invite theoretical and empirical papers inspired by, but not limited to, any of the following themes:

• How can feminist participatory methods facilitate the process of (a) social and mutual construction of knowledge ? (b) the researcher positioning her/himself critically and reflexively, explaining her/his own partiality and also facilitating connections among participants?
• How does your method choice practically aims at overcoming the often hierarchical and exploitative relationships between the researcher and the research participants? What are ethical dilemmas and hurdles related to this question?
• How have you been personally challenged by such methodological choices? Authoetnographical reflections.
• Introjective and projective processes, misunderstandings as part of a mutually constitutive process that blurs boundaries between us and facilitates our reciprocal identification, intended as the capacity to grasp at least to some extent the other´s condition (Bondi 2003; Lagesen 2010).
• How can a feminist epistemological perspective enrich and problematize commonly used qualitative methods such as as participant observation, focus groups, qualitative interviews, mapping and GIS as well as member checking?
• What are possible problems that can rise both within academic circles as well as the research participants when using participatory methods?
• In cross-language and cross-cultural research, how do participatory methods bridge the distance (or not) between the researcher and the research participants? What is the role played by the assistant/interpreter in this process? What are specific challenges that emerge when researchers from the global North want to carry out research in the global South? What challenges would emerge in a scenario when researchers from the global South carry out participatory research in the global North?
• Last but not least, how do feminist participative methods encourage and facilitate the presentation of research findings to the research participants as well as to the public? What kinds of practical tools have you employed for bringing the knowledge back to the communities that co-produced it?

REFERENCES

Bondi, L. 2003. Empathy and identification: conceptual resources for feminist fieldwork. ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography, 2, 64-76

Cho, J., Trent, A., 2006. Validity in qualitative research revisited. Qualitative Research 6, 319–340.

Code, L. 2006. Women Knowing/Knowing Women: Critical-Creative Interventions in the Politics of Knowledge, in: Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies. SAGE, 146–166.

Colls, R., 2012. Feminism, bodily difference and non-representational geographies. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37, 430–445.

Cope, M. 2002. Feminist epistemology in geography. In Feminist geography in practice: research methods. Moss, P. (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers. 43-56.

Domosh, M. 2003. Toward a More Fully Reciprocal Feminist Inquiry. ACME 2. Pp. 107–111.

Kannen, V., 2012. Pregnant, privileged and PhDing: exploring embodiments in qualitative research. Journal of Gender Studies 0, 1–14.

Lagesen, V.A., 2010. The Importance of Boundary Objects in Transcultural Interviewing. European Journal of Women’s Studies 17, 125–142.

Maynard, M. 1994. Methods, Practice and Epistemology in Maynard, M. Purvis, J. (eds.)  Researching women's lives from a feminist perspective. London : Taylor & Francis.

Riaño, Y. 2012. The production of knowledge as a "Minga": Challenges and Opportunities of a New Methodological Approach based on Co-Determination and Reciprocity". Working Paper Series MAPS: 3, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. ISSN : 1662-744X.