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Week Two: Feminist Research Practice - Lectures

Feminist epistemologies

Feminist empiricism: setting up a better criteria for "good science", eliminating gender bias by adding women's perspective into research, re-analysing existing research by adding women's experiences, developing alternative research questions.

Feminist standpoint: starting from the experience of the oppressed to understand the underlying structures of social operations of power, central role of experience, CRITIQUE - universalisation of the notion of "a woman".

Situated knowledges: Donna Haraway. Instead of strong objectivity, partial, situated objectivity. Partial perspectives instead of grand narratives, partial objectivity to avoid the God Trick, accountability for all choices made in research process.

"Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see." (Haraway 2004, 365)

Feminist Postmodernism: How discourse materialises social and cultural practices, human subjects and power relations, deconstructing hegemonic norms and binary understanding of relations (e.g reason vs emotion), challenging essentialism - e.g that sex and gender are neutral categories, that they have their bodily essence which is merely represented socially.

Postconstructionism: understanding knowledge and reality and mutually constitutive - onto-epistemology, challenging understanding of causality - intra-action rather than interaction, understanding of world and matter (not only human or animate subjects) as agential.

Postcolonial approach: criticism of a unitary category of a woman/women, against "giving voice to", criticism of privilege of Western perspective, critical race/black studies, decolonial turn.

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Ghostly matters - how knowledge production and reality is entangled. "Haunting" is a methodology and an analytical tool used to understand how contemporary are constructed to excluded something. How does this exclusion enable what is not being talked about? What is excluded in the narrative and what is still there?

What is the goal of Gordon's work?

Book addresses "modern forms of dispossession, exploitation, repression, and their concrete impacts on the people most affected by them and on our shared conditions of living." p.xv

What, why and how of research - methodology
Justify why the research project is relevant.

What kind of knowledge has been excluded from the canon?

How would we analyse state terror through haunting?
Rob Nixon - Slow violence - accumulation of waste or emotional trauma.
Cruel Optimism - Why do we stick with something that hurts in the hope that it will one day get better?

Something haunts that has not properly been dealt with, it can cause trauma and pain.

What is a problem today can have a very different problem in the future.

Your engagement with a research object will change your methods and practices. Your own location will also change your view of something, be reflexive of your own bias.

How to engage with your position as a white feminist: "Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located." p.22
i.e by identify an oppression, the first step is to reimagine beyond the ghost, and position yourself within that re-imagination and form something new, and allow yourself to transformed. The way describe phenoma is already informed by your position. As researchers you are part of the stories you tell and they transform you.

How does Gordon's work position itself epistemologically? - She used fictional work to make her arguments. How can her work be engaged with fiction and fact simultaneously.

Subjugated knowledges - knowledge that is erased or delegitimised, not present in the canon, erased symbolically or practically.

Foucault - erased and hidden and invisible forms of knowledge.

Gordon - by mentioning subjugated knowledge, Gordon is showing the haunting of the work before her.

This work is interdisciplinary because she uses terms that escape disciplines across social sciences and humanities.

When doing research, always ask oneself the question "what haunts this"

Start by describing your project by asking what, why and how.
What moves you?
What are you concerned and/or passionate about?
What problems do you find necessary to addresS?

Why is your question relevant?
What has been researched on the topic so far?
How does existing research support your research question?
What is missing in a current research?





















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