Feminism and its Methods

12-13 July 2010, University of Manchester

The conference will have a dual focus on:

• methods as a means for rethinking feminisms, as well as
• the histories, transformations and travels of feminist methods and methodologies.

Academic reflections on feminism and its recent past have tended not to encompass feminist methods and methodologies. This workshop aims to explore how our understanding of feminism might be transformed if we focus in particular on methods. The widespread influence of feminist methods across the social sciences and humanities could be taken as evidence of feminism’s vitality, countering narratives of its demise. However, this influence often goes unmarked and unacknowledged. Feminist methods and methodologies have not been taken up evenly across disciplines, and do not necessarily index the same debates. In this event, we are keen to promote dialogue within and between different quarters of feminist practice, research and activism. This colloquium will explore how feminist methods have been taken up and transformed in and across disciplines, that is, how feminist methods have travelled.

Methods have been central to feminist practices, from the making of women’s history and the creation of feminist archives, to the speak-out, consciousness-raising groups, manifestoes, oral histories, feminist utopian fiction. This historical centrality poses questions about the contemporary relationship between methods and feminism.

In this colloquium we aim to interrogate a range of questions, including debates on: 

• What would the recent feminist past look like, refracted through an account of feminist methods?
• If we understand our methods as not merely descriptive, but also as performative, how is it that our methods appeared to produce the demise of feminism?
• How have feminist methods travelled between different academic disciplines and traversed the domains of academia, activism, the media, business and commercial worlds?
• (How) have feminist methods changed over time?
• What is the relationship between feminist generations and methods?
• Is feminist history and archives still being created?
• Do we need new methods for new times? (For example how far do psycho-social approaches stem from a feminist imperative to include the personal)
• What can specific feminist methods offer? (For eg manifestoes; reclaim the night marches, online blogs; virtual networking, consciousness-raising etc)
• Can we still talk about a feminist research ethic?
• What role does contemporary feminist activism have in social movements (e.g. global justice movement, anti-globalisation movement, women’s health movement, movements against violence against women)?
• Do we need to reconfigure the relationship between theory and the empirical?