Looking at feminist and anti-racist approaches situated in or focused on Western Europe, especially Germany, this article investigates how racism and migration can be theorised in relation to each ...other in critical knowledge production. Rather than being an article 'about Germany', my intervention understands the German context as an exemplary place for deconstructing Europe and its gendered, racialised and sexualised premises. I argue that a 'postcolonial turn' has begun to emerge in Western European gender and migration studies and is questioning easy assumptions about the connections between racism and migration. Discussing examples from academic knowledge production and media debates, I suggest to think of migratisation (the ascription of migration) as performative practice that repeatedly re-stages a sending-off to an elsewhere and works in close interaction with racialisation. In particular, drawing on postcolonial approaches, I carve out the interconnection of racialisation and migratisation with class and gender. I argue that equating racialisation with migratisation carries the risk of whitening understandings of migration and/or reinforcing already whitened understandings of nation and Europeanness. To make discrimination 'accessible' to critical knowledge production, I engage in an epistemological discussion of the potentials and challenges of differentiating analytical categorisations. With this, this article engages with ascriptions, exclusions and abjectifications and attempts to formulate precise conceptualisations for the ever shifting forms of resistance we urgently need in transnational feminist activism and knowledge production.
The empiricism underlying the research techniques developed in the context of the discursive turn of the late 1980s opened up various polemics during the 1990s on the practice of critical research. ...This effervescence led in the 2000s to the development and consolidation of Narrative Production Methodology as a qualitative research technique in the Catalan academic and activist context. Its grounding in feminist epistemology and dialogism provides a set of methodological principles for articulating and transforming partial positions of knowledge in the production of what Haraway considers 'objective knowledge.' The article provides the academic and epistemological context for the emergence of the Narrative Production Methodology and outlines the main technical procedures involved in the technique. Finally, the text reflects on the ontological implications of the narrative perspective.
This article uses fieldnotes along with student and practitioner feedback to recount the challenges, benefits, and broader learnings of engaging master’s students in a participatory research seminar. ...The students developed research proposals about a real-world socioeconomic challenge with and for local practitioners. Proposals were consistent with the principles and practices of participatory action research (PAR). The planning, implementation, and assessment of this course was informed by feminist scientific philosophies of collaboration, situatedness, partiality, accountability, and a sensitivity to power dynamics. In line with both PAR and SoTL principles, there was an explicit emphasis on partnership, reflexivity, and broad forms of learning in both the classroom and practitioner meetings. The students were challenged by the unfamiliarity of the research approach, the need to navigate a new way of working directly with stakeholders, as well as the responsibility to the community that participatory approaches espouse. Despite the challenges, the students were eager to soak up local knowledges, reflect on their role as researchers, and contribute constructively if they could.
A noção de interseccionalidades emerge da experiência política de feminismos negros e pauta as dinâmicas entrecruzadas que estão na base de desigualdades sociais como gênero, raça, sexualidades e ...classe. Dessa perspectiva, ela é tomada como uma possibilidade de produzir teoria e para se questionar analiticamente diversas experiências e contextos, gerando novas lições acerca dos processos de dominação. Além de uma ferramenta metodológica central; nas vivências e ações políticas, se apresenta como um campo aberto de resistências às narrativas e práticas hegemônicas ocidentais. Neste texto, apresentamos os artigos que compõem o Dossiê Interseccionalidades, direitos e políticas, com atenção à diversidade de abordagens e contribuições que permitem expandir a densidade dos fundamentos epistemológicos nas ciências sociais, como na práxis política.
Wikipedia has become increasingly prominent in online search results, serving as an initial path for the public to access “facts,” and lending plausibility to its autobiographical claim to be “the ...sum of all human knowledge.” However, this self-conception elides Wikipedia’s role as the world’s largest online site of encyclopedic knowledge production. A repository for established facts, Wikipedia is also a social space in which the facts themselves are decided. As a community, Wikipedia is guided by the five pillars—principles that inform and undergird the prevailing epistemic and social norms and practices for Wikipedia participation and contributions. We contend these pillars lend structural support to and help entrench Wikipedia’s gender gap as well as its lack of diversity in both participation and content. In upholding these pillars, Wikipedians may unknowingly undermine otherwise reasonable calls for inclusivity, subsequently reproducing systemic biases. We propose an alternative set of pillars developed through the lens of feminist epistemology, drawing on Lorraine Code’s notion of epistemic responsibility and Helen Longino’s notion of procedural objectivity. Our aim is not only to reduce bias, but also to make Wikipedia a more robust, reliable, and transparent site for knowledge production.
Freire perceives reality as a process, an eternal becoming, in which solidarity between individuals and the world is an indispensable factor for true thinking and, consequently, for true dialogue. ...However, in order for this dialogue to succeed, it warns us that one can not do without everyone having a voice, that is, if an individual, or group of individuals, is in the condition of being oppressed in his limited freedom of speech, while the other denies this the right to say the word, there is no possibility of dialogue between them. Therefore, it is necessary that everyone first conquer the right to the necessary spaces of speech so that among all there may be an act of solidarity and plural creation. However, although the damage caused by the production of exclusive knowledge is easily observable, the mechanisms to change such a framework are little applied. The present work seeks to demonstrate an alternative of dialogic education based on the affection implemented by a Minas Gerais teacher in Fundamental Education through feminist, antiracist and inclusive pedagogical practices.
In this article, we offer insights derived from an analysis of a structured dialogue on methodological decision making. Our analysis highlights the ways in which our dialogic process for revising a ...manuscript reflected key onto-epistemic qualities of Black women's ways of knowing. Drawing from an Afrocentric feminist epistemological standpoint, we tease apart how shared ways of knowing can facilitate heightened clarity about one's engagement in the research process. By positioning structured dialogues as a methodological tool, we offer several insights regarding their generative nature in facilitating researcher clarity on methodological decision making and in elucidating key shifts in the evolution of a researcher's methodological self. Indeed, as a form of facilitated reflexive praxis, engaging in structure dialogues about one's methodological choices is requisite for defining and understanding oneself as a researcher, scholar, and intellectual.
The increased visibility of feminism in mainstream culture has recently been noted, with the presence of both online and offline campaigns embedding feminist claims in a variety of everyday spaces. ...By granting recognition to women’s experiences, these campaigns continue the feminist practice of generating critical knowledge on the basis of gendered experience. In the post-truth era, however, the norms governing claims-making are being significantly reconstructed, with significant consequences for critiques of gender inequality. It is argued here that these norms are linked directly to a wider context of anti-feminism in which dismissing women’s claims is consistent with the goal that opponents of gender equality have of seeking and consolidating epistemic power in the face of what is perceived as systemic male disadvantage and victimhood. Returning to earlier debates within feminism, it is argued that the kinds of post-truth rhetoric used to dismiss women’s experience provide a challenge that feminism must confront. This rhetoric is often grounded in the authenticity of individual experience; however, experience cannot provide unmediated access to truth and, therefore, cannot provide the foundation for feminist claims. On the other hand, experience cannot merely offer one of many contested versions of ‘reality’. The excesses of both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist epistemology are countered with the argument that cognition is a human practice mediated by theoretical propositions which illuminate the question of what can be known. This is the role played by feminist theory in defending the role of experience.
What is the best method for undertaking critical social theory, and what are its ontological and normative commitments? Andreas Reckwitz has developed compelling answers to these questions drawing on ...practice theory. As a practice theorist myself, I am very sympathetic to his approach. This paper sketches a social theory that extends the reach of practice theory to include non-human animals and allows us to discriminate between importantly different kinds of social formations. In doing so, I argue that a strongly normative basis for differentiating social phenomena is compatible with the methods of social theory and critical social theorists need not shy away from first-order moral commitments.
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