Of serial murder and true crime: Some preliminary thoughts on black feminist research praxis and the implications of settler colonialism

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-29
Author(s):  
Terrion L Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Serial Murder ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Research Praxis ◽  
True Crime

Writing Ourselves into Existence

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-27
Author(s):  
Shardé M. Davis ◽  
Frances Ashun ◽  
Alleyha Dannett ◽  
Kayla Edwards ◽  
Victoria Nwaohuocha
Keyword(s):  
Women Students ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Black Feminist Thought ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Critical Autoethnography ◽  
Research Praxis

Academia can be a hostile environment for Black women. Our research team leveraged Black feminist research praxis to produce new knowledge countering conceptions of Black women students and faculty as people who are unintelligent, produce superfluous work, and worthy of being ignored. In order to locate spaces for healing, mentorship, and validation, we engaged in a collaborative autoethnography to co-narrate our experiences while conducting a study for, by, and about Black women. Re-purposing tools from Black feminist thought, critical autoethnography, and collaborative autoethnography enabled us to write ourselves into existence, countering damaging narratives and subverting the harm inflicted by the institution.

Critical Participatory Action Research: A Feminist Project for Validity and Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Fine ◽  
María Elena Torre
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Action Research ◽  
Participatory Action Research ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Participatory Action ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Research Praxis ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Critical Participatory Action Research ◽  
Trans Youth

We present critical participatory action research as an enactment of feminist research praxis in psychology. We discuss the key elements of critical participatory action research through the story of a single, national participatory project. The project was designed by and for LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus) and gender-expansive youth; it was called What’s Your Issue? We provide details of the research project, the dreams, desires, experiences, and structural precarity of queer and trans youth. We write this article hoping readers will appreciate the complexities of identities, attend to the relentless commitment to recognition and solidarities, learn the ethical and epistemological principles of critical participatory action research as a feminist and intersectional praxis, and appreciate the provocative blend of research and action toward social justice. Online slides for instructors who want to use this article for teaching are available on PWQ's website at http://journals.sagepub.com/page/pwq/suppl/index

scholarly journals In Conversation with Fikile Nxumalo: Refiguring Onto-Epistemic Attunements for Im/possible Science Pedagogies

2021 ◽  
pp. 321-330
Author(s):  
Fikile Nxumalo ◽  
Maria F. G. Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Science Education ◽  
Early Childhood Education ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Indigenous Knowledges ◽  
Educational Spaces

AbstractThis chapter elucidates critical concepts of place in relation to Black-feminist and more-than-human geographies in the context of early childhood education. This conversation helps get at pressing political contexts for science education that are often excluded in white educational spaces. Our conversation with Dr. Nxumalo offers practical starting points for researchers interested in playing with the messy intersections of materiality, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Indigenous knowledges, and more-than-human kin.

Serial Killing and Representation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip L. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Serial Killer ◽  
Serial Killers ◽  
Serial Murder ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Popular Imagination ◽  
Serial Killing ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Jack The Ripper

Serial killing is an age-old problem, though it was not popularly known by that name until the 1980s. It took the rise of mass media and the mechanisms of mass production to create the conditions for the rise of serial murder in the modern world. The mass media representation of a series of murders arguably dates back to the notoriety accorded to the so-called Jack the Ripper killings of prostitutes in London in the autumn of 1888. The Ripper murders stand at a particular nexus in the representation of true crime, where fact and legend immediately fused in popular media to create a terrifying new modern, urban mythology of a preternaturally cunning human super-predator: one who strikes from the shadows to commit ghastly murder with impunity and then retreats back into that darkness until the next atrocity. Since the days of Jack the Ripper, a ghoulish pantheon of other serial killers has captivated the public imagination through representation in media: the Zodiac Killer, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Henry Lee Lucas, Richard Ramirez, and Jeffrey Dahmer, just to name a few. However, the term “serial killer” did not enter the American popular vocabulary until the 1980s, so in another sense, the true representation of what we now know as serial killing could not begin until it had this latest, proper name. In tandem, as cultural consciousness of serial murder expanded, fictional serial killers proliferated the media landscape: Patrick Bateman, Norman Bates, Francis Dolarhyde, Lou Ford, Jame Gumb, Mickey and Mallory Knox, Leatherface, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan, Tom Ripley, and a host of others. Serial killers as they exist in the popular imagination are media constructs rooted in sociological/criminological/psychological realities. These constructs originate from collective fears or anxieties specific to a particular time and place, which also means as times and the cultural zeitgeist change, the serial killer as a character epitomizing human evil is endlessly reinvented for new audiences in popular media.

Ethics as Teamwork

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Braedley
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Project Design ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Collaborative Project ◽  
Ethical Research ◽  
Design Processes ◽  
Consultation Team ◽  
Procedural Ethics ◽  
Research Praxis

Ethics as Teamwork details how well-planned collaborative teamwork processes offer opportunities to develop an ethical research praxis that extends well beyond formal ethics reviews. The chapter provides an analysis of teamwork processes involved in the “reimagining” ethnographies and their impact on procedural ethics (formal ethics reviews), practice ethics (issues emerging while conducting the research), project ethics (issues related to the international, interdisciplinary, and collaborative project design). Processes identified include building consensus through meetings of many kinds, problem-solving consultation, team reflexivity and the use of discretion when democracy was not possible. Situating these processes within the frame of critical feminist research, the chapter makes links between these ethical processes and research that aims to create change.

The Vampire of Düsseldorf and the Butcher of Hanover

M ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Samm Deighan
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Serial Murder ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
German Child ◽  
True Crime

This chapter explores the numerous ways in which Fritz Lang's M prefigured and captured the growing understanding of serial murder in cinema. It recounts how Lang used a number of true crime sources and spent several days in a mental asylum to conduct his intensive research. It also mentions how Lang was inspired by several real-life German child killers like Fritz Haarmann, Peter Kürten, and Carl Großmann, whom he also allegedly interviewed. The chapter contrasts M and Lang's other work during the period with other German films that portray violent killers as their protagonists, such as those made by F.W. Murnau and G.W. Pabst. It looks at how directors of horror-themed movies deal with the intersection of violence, death, and sexuality.

Black Feminist Philosophy and the Politics of Refusal

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axelle Karera
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Women And Girls ◽  
Research Agendas

This chapter discusses the meaning, possibility, and contributions of Black feminist philosophy. The chapter discusses a politics of refusal that characterizes Black women’s theorizing and develops it as a framework for understanding how Black feminist philosophy is more than mere corrective and subversion of mainstream philosophy. As a framework, Black feminist philosophical “politics of refusal” depicts how Black feminist philosophers doing philosophy for Black women and girls refuse to sell themselves short, refuse institutionally imposed intellectual trajectories, and refuse to respond to philosophy’s call to order in their attempts to lay down uncompromisingly Black feminist research agendas in philosophy. The chapter offers an overview of important contributions to the field and discusses how a politics of refusal operates as critique and knowledge production within the field.

On the way to decolonization in a settler colony: Re-introducing Black feminist identity politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 190-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristie Dotson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Feminist Identity ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Way

In this paper, I explain Black feminist identity politics as a practice that is ‘on the way’ to settler decolonization in a US context for the fact that it makes demands that we attend to our “originating” stories and, in doing so, 1) generate potential for difficult coalitions for decolonization in settler colonial USA and 2) promoting a range of refusals (Simpson 2014) that aid in resisting the completion of settler colonialism in North America, which is still an uncompleted project. Ultimately, I claim Black feminist identity politics, properly understood, is a practice that aids in retaining the possibility of decolonization in a settler colonial state by resisting the historical unknowing that facilitates settler futurity. It is not itself settler decolonization, but rather it is “on the way” to such decolonization as it keeps open the need for decolonial futurity.

On the politics of discomfort

2021 ◽  
pp. 146470012098737
Author(s):  
Rachelle Chadwick
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Feminist Research ◽  
Research Strategies ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Gut Feelings ◽  
Research Praxis ◽  
Affective Intensity ◽  
Postcolonial Feminist ◽  
Opening Up

This article engages the politics of discomfort as a critical but neglected dimension of feminist methodologies and research praxis. Discomfort is explored as a ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being and resisting. I theorise discomfort as an epistemic and interpretive resource and a lively actant in research encounters, fieldwork and analytic and theory-praxis spaces. Building on the work of Clare Hemmings and Sara Ahmed, I trace discomfort as an affective intensity that matters for opening up resistant and anti-colonial feminist research practices and modes of knowledge production. Starting, and staying, with discomfortis theorised as a form of resistance to the reiteration of comfortable and normative truths and ‘wilful ignorances’. Weaving together the work of postqualitative and postcolonial feminist theorists, the sticky praxis of discomfort is conceptualised as involving a number of research strategies, including: (1) engaging with ‘gut feelings’ and (2) embracing interpretive hesitancy. In moving beyond an idealisation of empathy as the central affective principle underlying feminist research praxis, this article explores the epistemic and political salience of discomfort as affective intensity, ‘sweaty concept’ and potentially transformative interpretive resource.

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