Introduction to Feminist Methodologies

Although issues of, among others, power in the field, hierarchy in research situations and research ethics, are not specific to gender research or qualitative methods, qualitative gender researchers pay particular attention to them. Feminist methodologies have established a long tradition of questioning the gendered nature of all parts of the research process, including the methods themselves. They have also developed approaches that use gender as an analytic category in order to foreground the situatedness of knowledge production, to analyse the perspective of privilege in the research process, to bring forward the perspectives of underprivileged and marginalised groups and to achieve “strong objectivity” (Harding).

This lecture is part of a one-off course that is enabled by the funding from an APPEAR educational project in partnership with the Islamic University of Gaza. The five sessions will be transmitted by audio and video to the IUG with consecutive translation into Arabic. At the IUG the course is run as a lecture series organized by the Gender and Women's Studies Centre that the APPEAR project helped establish. This introductory lecture to the course will address the issues of the difference between epistemology, method and methodology, the contribution of feminist research to qualitative inquiry and the overall principles of feminist methodologies.