Feminist methodology : challenges and choices
"Who would be a feminist now? Contemporary 'political realism' suggests that the essentials of the battle have already been won, and the current generation of women entering University is used to seeing feminism presented as 'old fashioned', 'extreme' and 'unrealistic'. Challenging such assumptions, this important new book argues for the value of empirical investigations of gendered life, and brings together the theoretical, political and practical aspects of feminist methodology. Feminist Methodology: a- demonstrates how feminist approaches to methodology engage with debates in western philosophy to raise critical questions about knowledge production; b- shows that feminist methodology has a distinctive place in social research; c- guides the reader through the terrain of feminist methodology and clarifies how feminists can claim knowledge of gendered social existence; and d- connects abstract issues of theory with issues in fieldwork practice."--Back cover
vii, 195 pages ; 25 cm
9780761951223, 9780761951230, 0761951229, 0761951237
48361931
Three challenges to feminist methodology
What is gender?
What is feminism in the twenty-first century?
Are feminists women?
What is methodology in social research?
Is feminist methodology distinctively feminist?
Reason, science and progress: feminism's Enlightenment inheritance
Enlightenment thought
Reason, science and progress: how Enlightenment thought has shaped feminist approaches to methodology
Modem humanism
The long shadow of the Enlightenment: challenges and contradictions at the roots of modem feminist methodology
Can feminists tell the truth? Challenges of scientific method
Feminist research as a quest for valid knowledge of social realities by a knowing subject
Feminist objections to scientific method in social research
Objectivity, subjectivity, relativism: competing paths to truth
From truth/reality to knowledge/power: taking a feminist standpoint
The knowing feminist at the limits of modern methodology
A methodological continuum: slipping and sliding on Haraway's greasy pole
What is a feminist standpoint?
Nancy Hartsock: achieving a feminist standpoint as a vantage point on male supremacy
Dorothy Smith: taking women's standpoint; beginning in experience
What problems remain?
Escape from epistemology? The impact of postmodern thought on feminist methodology
Postmodern thought
Postmodern freedoms: sweeping away the foundations of feminist methodology
Thus far but no further? Feminist resistance to postmodern thought
searching 'others': feminist methodology and the politics of difference
Confronting difference in feminist social research
Being different: the constitution of 'otherness'
Being different: experiencing and resisting 'otherness'
Complications of difference
The politics of representing 'others': the privileged researcher
The power of interpretation: data analysis
Reflexivity in the research process
Knowledge, experience and reality: justifying feminist connections
The case against taking experience as a source of knowledge
A case for taking experience as a source of knowledge
The difficulties of connecting experience and material realities
Should feminists specify criteria of validity?
The idea of a feminist epistemic community
Choices and decisions: doing a feminist research project
What makes social research feminist?
The research process
Situating your research question
Face to face with the research: data production
Face to face with the researched: putting reflexivity into practice
Face to face with the data: analysis and conclusions
Face to face with a blank sheet: writing up
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