Am re-reading a great article for class next week & wanting to comment on something that is unique to Gender Studies in a short thread which promotes some of my own writing & advocates for more interdisciplinarity in reflections on research

This piece: Caroline Faria & Sharlene Mollett (2016) Critical feminist reflexivity and the politics of whiteness in the ‘field’, Gender, Place & Culture, 23:1, 79-93. @cazfaria and @SharleneMollett

What I love about this piece is the way in which the researchers situate their own mixed & contradictory experiences of racialisation in the field as necessitating an 'exposing' of whiteness as spatially & historically shifting & contingent hence why I include it on syllabus

Many of the references in the bibliography go beyond feminist and emotional geographies, but plenty are missing as is to be expected in lieu of publishing limitations. What my own feminist education enabled me to do, rather freeing, was to 'travel' across disciplinary boundaries

such that I read texts that touched on issues of researcher's positionality & identity, racialisation in the field & power relations between researchers & participants, from a range of research traditions including anthropology, geography, sociology for example

This included (but is not limited to) two hugely influential pieces: Visweswaran, K. (1994). Fictions of feminist ethnography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press & Narayan, K. (1993). How native is a" native" anthropologist?. American anthropologist, 95(3), 671-686.

Which led to this publication: Thapar‐Björkert, S., & Henry, M. (2004). Reassessing the research relationship: location, position & power in fieldwork accounts. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 7(5), 363-381 and this:

Henry, M. G. (2003). Where are you really from?': representation, identity & power in the fieldwork experiences of a South Asian diasporic. Qualitative research, 3(2), 229-242 and then:

Henry, M. G. (2007). If the shoe fits: Authenticity, authority & agency feminist diasporic research, Women's Studies International Forum (Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 70-80). Pergamon.

After publishing these pieces several people wrote to me including their own publications & I realised that committments to interdisciplinarity & accounting for all the relevant texts influencing my own arguments is often a gigantic task. So I include a few overlooked pubs here:

Archer, L. (2002). ‘It's easier that you're a girl and that you're Asian’: interactions of ‘race’ and gender between researchers and participants. Feminist Review, 72(1), 108-132.

Phoenix, Ann (1994) “Practising Feminist Research: The Intersection of Gender & ‘Race’ in the Research Process” in Mary Maynard and June Purvis (eds.) Researching Women’s Lives from a Feminist Perspective. London: Taylor and
Francis. pp. 49-71.

McCorkel, J. A., & Myers, K. (2003). What difference does difference make? Position & privilege in the field. Qualitative sociology, 26(2), 199-231. @JillMcCorkel

Abu-Lughod, Lila (1990) Can there be a feminist ethnography?
Women and Performance, 5 (1), pp. 7-27.

Lal, Jayati (1996) Situating locations: The politics of self, identity, and “other” in living and writing the text
Diane Wolf (Ed.), Feminist dilemmas in fieldwork, Westview Press, Oxford, pp. 185-214.

Sherif, Bahira (2001)The ambiguity of boundaries in the fieldwork experience: Establishing rapport and negotiating insider/outsider status, Qualitative Inquiry, 7 (4), pp. 436-447.

Thapar-Bjorkert, S. (1999). Negotiating otherness: Dilemmas for a non-western researcher in the Indian sub-continent. Journal of Gender Studies, 8(1), 57-69.

Gunaratnam, Y. (2003). Researching'race'and ethnicity: Methods, knowledge and power. Sage. @YasminGun

Haritaworn, J. (2008). Shifting positionalities: Empirical reflections on a queer/trans of colour methodology. Sociological research online, 13(1), 162-173.

Sanghera, G. S., & Thapar-Björkert, S. (2008). Methodological dilemmas: Gatekeepers and positionality in Bradford. Ethnic and racial studies, 31(3), 543-562. @GurchSanghera

And the latest: Madhok, S. (2020). A critical reflexive politics of location, ‘feminist debt’ and thinking from the Global South. European Journal of Women's Studies, 27(4), 394-412. @sumi_madhok

My pointing in highlighting a few of these texts is to say that there is a world of wonderful scholarship out there (not bragging about my own work!). Sometimes it is really difficult to find articles and books & reading lists can be overwhelming. Faria and Mollett's 2016 piece

is an excellent example of one way of drawing on a range of influences from within & beyond one's discipline as well as a stimulus to dig deeper. Importantly, this is one of the few pieces on reflexivity that directly challenges whiteness & the whiteness of the field, so read it!

In addition, I invite you to join me in getting lost down many many rabbit holes on feminist epistemology, methodology, ethnography & on topics such as reflexivity, positionality, insider/outsider, reciprocity, research power relations & so on!