“I Don’t Know, But I’m Trying to Find Out, Okay?”

In the audio drama Welcome to Night Vale (2012-) and its spinoff novel It Devours! (2017), the character of Carlos the Scientist functions as a figure for both the larger enterprise of technoscience and a critique of Western technoscience. By pitting the narratives of the mad scientist and the heroic scientist against each other in a single person, Carlos’s character development arc shows that both cultural figures rely on the White masculinist tropes and values embedded in Western technoscience. Ultimately, Carlos’s arc depicts the limits of these structures and provides a solution in line with feminist epistemologies, emphasizing situatedness over universalism and communitarianism over individualism.

Reflexivity and Lived Experience of Out-of-Home Care: Positionality as an Early Parenthood Researcher

Knowledge, beliefs, identities, and emotions influence the ways in which all researchers engage in their work. Research processes are uniquely impacted when researchers share the lived experience under investigation, known as insider status. Reflexivity is an ongoing process of scrutinizing and responding to the ways in which positionality and subjectivities impact each stage of the research process. It can provide transparency, strengthen data interpretations, and increase researcher self-awareness. Broader aims of reflexivity aligned with feminist epistemologies are to shape researcher integrity and address structural inequalities. This article explores the author's engagement in reflexive practices while undertaking a PhD investigating early parenthood within the context of out-of-home care. Excerpts from interviews with 3 young mothers, a foster carer, and 11 professionals illustrate how the author's own lived experiences of out-of-home care and new motherhood assisted with building rapport and shared knowledge creation. Strategies employed to manage the risks of over-identifying with participants’ feelings of stigmatization and anxiety are also discussed to demonstrate how appropriate recognition of personal history can enhance the research process. This article concludes by arguing for meaningful opportunities to involve care-experienced people in social work research.

“It ain’t a compliment”: Feminist data visualisation and digital street harassment advocacy

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level.

Doing Academia Differently: Loosening the Boundaries of Our Disciplining Writing Practices

In this article, I explore questions of pedagogy and knowledge-writing practices in their relation to knowledge production. Starting from the observation that different styles of writing are present in our work, but many of them are systematically pushed back and mis-read as non-academic, the article brings to the fore a discussion on the direct relationship between practices of knowledge-writing and those modes of knowing that escape the linear and propositional academic style while still being part of how knowledge comes into being. Following a tradition of intersectional feminist epistemologies, I engage with questions of epistemologies and critical pedagogies, speaking to and with several generations of scholars who address and work with questions of diversity and knowledge production that are seminal within International Relations (IR), yet underexplored from the perspective of knowledge-writing practices.

Using black feminist epistemologies and activist frameworks to counter structural racism in design

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. --- Sheena Erete, Editor

An Analysis of Reflections on Researcher Positionality

Reflexivity is a central tenet of qualitative research. Engaging in self-reflexive praxis allows researchers to identify areas of tension in the research process that need to be further deconstructed. In this paper, we draw on our collective self-reflective experiences as qualitative health researchers whose scholarship is informed by critical and postcolonial feminist epistemologies to offer some guidance on how to approach the concept of insider versus outsider in the research process. Specifically, we analyze recurring methodological tensions related to positionality and outline how they were addressed. The lessons learned from our studies can be instructive to other qualitative researchers

Diseño y desafíos metodológicos de la investigación feminista en ciencias sociales

La investigación feminista genera otras formas de hacer ciencia. En el ámbito de las ciencias sociales, aún sigue resultando desconocida y controvertida desde el punto de vista metodológico. Las epistemologías feministas, sus principios y valores marcan las directrices metodológicas de este tipo de investigación. Hay escasos trabajos que se centren en aportar pautas aplicadas y sintéticas de lo que implica una buena práctica de investigación desde este enfoque. Por ello, nos proponemos generar, desde la evidencia, una guía con pasos metodológicos que permitan planear y diseñar la investigación feminista. También, perseguimos identificar en la literatura científica los principales desafíos metodológicos a los que se enfrenta en la actualidad este tipo de investigación. Así, realizamos una revisión de literatura reciente y referente en la materia, seleccionando tanto estudios empíricos y que recogen casos ilustrativos de investigaciones feministas como reflexiones metodológicas y revisiones publicadas en revistas de una diversidad de áreas de ciencias sociales y que cuentan con revisión por pares. El análisis de las contribuciones se realiza desde un enfoque temático y de teoría fundamentada, siguiendo procesos de codificación abierta y abductiva, donde se tienen en cuenta conceptos nucleares para las epistemologías feministas. Los procesos de análisis buscan la proyección aplicada de principios y valores de las epistemologías feministas en una estructura interpretativa que guíe y oriente la investigación. El aporte final supone disponer de una guía fundamentada y ejemplificada que permite articular futuros diseños de investigación, alertando sobre aspectos metodológicos clave para tener en cuenta. Así como también, se identifican cuatro desafíos metodológicos principales que mantienen el debate abierto en la academia en torno a la investigación feminista actual. En última instancia, el estudio invita a la reflexión sobre la tensión entre el ideal de investigación feminista, la práctica actual de esta investigación y las posibilidades metodológicas que implica su puesta en marcha.Feminist research generates other ways of doing science. In the field of social sciences, it is still unknown and controversial from a methodological point of view. Feminist epistemologies, their principles and values set the methodological guidelines for this type of research. There are few works that focus on providing applied and synthetic guidelines of what a good research practice implies from this approach. Therefore, we propose to generate, from the evidence, a guide with methodological steps that allow planning and designing feminist research. Also, we seek to identify in the scientific literature the main methodological challenges that this type of research currently faces. Thus, we conducted a review of recent and benchmark literature on the subject, selecting both empirical studies that collect illustrative cases of feminist research as well as methodological reflections and reviews published in journals from a variety of areas of social sciences and that have peer review. The analysis of the contributions is carried out from a thematic and grounded theory approach, following open and abductive coding processes, where core concepts for feminist epistemologies are taken into account. The analysis processes seek the applied projection of principles and values of feminist epistemologies in an interpretive structure that guides and orients the investigation. The final contribution involves having a well-founded and exemplified guide that allows the articulation of future research designs, warning about key methodological aspects to take into account. As well as, four main methodological challenges are identified that keep the debate open in academia around current feminist research. Ultimately, the study invites reflection on the tension between the ideal of feminist research, the current practice of this research and the methodological possibilities that its implementation implies.

Un viaje por las emociones en procesos de investigación feminista

En este artículo enfatizamos el valor epistémico de las emociones en los procesos de investigación (en el saber qué y en el saber cómo). Nos centramos no sólo en cómo las emociones de quien investiga afectan el proceso de investigación sino cómo el propio proceso afecta –emocionalmente- a las investigadoras. En concreto, explicamos las diferentes razones por las cuales es importante reconocer el papel de las emociones en los procesos de investigación: metodológicas e instrumentales, éticas, analíticas, políticas y sanadoras. También exponemos los inconvenientes de enfatizar las emociones en la investigación. Partiendo del concepto de “reflexividad fuerte” de las epistemologías feministas, proponemos un viaje para reflexionar sobre las emociones y sus diferentes implicaciones en una investigación académica: el impacto emocional de la investigación en la investigadora (especialmente cuando se trabaja con población vulnerable), el trabajo emocional que implica la investigación y, en concreto, el trabajo de campo (y los dilemas éticos que puede implicar), las emociones como datos o evidencia y el conocimiento emocionalmente sentido.In this paper, we emphasize the epistemic value of emotions in the research process (to know what and know how). We focus not only on how the researcher's emotions affect the research process but also on how the process itself affects – emotionally- the researchers. Specifically, we explain the different reasons why it is important to recognize the role of emotions in research processes: methodological and instrumental, ethical, analytical, political and “healers”. We also expose the drawbacks of emphasizing emotions in research. Starting from the concept of "strong reflexivity" of feminist epistemologies, we propose a journey through emotions and their different implications in feminist research: the emotional impact of research on the researcher (especially when working with vulnerable population); the “emotional work” involved in the research and, specifically, in the fieldwork (and the ethical dilemmas that may involve); emotions as data/evidence and emotionally sensed knowledge.