Week Two: Feminist Research Practice - Log

Please choose an unconventional research topic and discuss how you would approach it methodologically. It is up to you to decide what is an unconventional (and hence also conventional) research object, how you want to describe it, and what method you suggest for its analysis.

What would happen if we based our society on the structure of a bee hive? I would like to research this topic because I believe our society as it currently stands is unsustainable and is leading to environmental ruin. To say a research topic is unconventional, is to say that there is a conventional research topic. What makes a research topic un/conventional? It is an incredibly binaristic categorisation to place research topics into the two fields, saying that the 'conventional' which infers safe, traditional and accepted, whilst 'unconventional' implies the topic is unusual, going against the grain and nonconformist. If I am to take this definition of unconventional, then I would say my research topic is so, because a restructure of society is often met with extreme reluctance and suspicion by the general population, who are often more than content to continue living in the current society. Another reason why my research topic is unconventional is because a beehive is headed by a matriarchal figurehead, the queen bee. Matriarchies are not very common in Western societies, due to the nature of patriarchal history of our governmental bodies, so to suggest a structure based around a single female figure could be perceived as being unconventional.  

I believe this research needs to be urgently done because the current power structures that are in place in Western society favour profit over people, treat women (some more than others) as second-class citizens, and are heading towards environmental self-destruction. I believe that this has a lot to do with the fact that the majority of governments and large corporations are headed by old, rich, white men. 

I would like to begin the research by locating myself in the Western world, as a white woman who has benefited greatly from the current societal structure. I would draw attention to the fact that the people who are most affected by the damaging societal structure in the Western world are people who are marginalised by oppressions that do not effect me, and therefore in order not to speak for these people, I would approach my research by speaking with the people to whom a restructure of society would benefit the most. 

Methodologically, I would begin by researching the structure of a beehive and how the bee community interacts, by interviewing a beekeeper. I would also take notes on an actual beehive to see the interactions for myself. The benefit of interviewing a beekeeper is that they have expert knowledge on the inner-workings of the hive, but in order not to be bogged down by the way previous research has been collected, and therefore how the bee society has been perceived from a scientific perspective, I would collect primary research myself.

I would then hold a focus group with women who have first hand experience living in a matriarchal society. I think this method would be important because that way my own bias about how much better a matriarchal society would be, would be dispelled by women who had actually lived in one and could therefore attest to how beneficial it could be. 

Finally, I would investigate the process of restructuring a society based on close reading of how societies have been restructured in the past. I would have to be aware that the majority of historical texts about older societies was collected by a certain echelon of society, so in order to balance out my results, I would also find research collected by alternative, preferably marginalised historians who had a local perspective.