‘Feminism and its Methods’ is a collaborative project of a number of researchers based at CRESC and beyond. We are interested that academic reflections on feminism and its recent past have tended not to encompass feminist methods and methodologies, and are exploring how understandings of feminism might be transformed if we focus in particular on methods. We are examining transformations and endurances in feminist methods. An exploration of the trajectory of feminist methods provides a productive means of looking at change, which challenges epochal approaches.

Feminist methodologies have been enormously influential, if not always acknowledged, in shaping, the ways in which research is conducted and in implementing its outcomes, notable through the links between feminist theory, methods and activism. Feminist methods and methodologies have not been taken up evenly across disciplines, and do not necessarily index the same debates. Hence we are tracing 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. We are addressing the interconnections between feminist activism and feminist methods by looking at the trajectory of feminist methods and exploring the interrelationship between different feminist methods. We are keen to explore how methods have travelled across and through generations and in methods which enable cross-generational conversations; as well as in thinking about the exclusions of feminist methods.

The project is itself an exercise in feminist methods, involving collaborative work across CRESC (Jacqui Gabb, Niamh Moore, Kath Woodward, Sophie Woodward), with the School of Social Science at Manchester (Bridget Byrne, Sophie Woodward), and with CESAGen another ESRC Research Centre, across Cardiff and Lancaster (Joan Haran).

We organised a conference called Feminism and its Methods, 12-13 July 2010, Manchester Museum, University of Manchester 

Publications

We are currently working together to publish a special issue of a journal based on papers from the ‘Feminism and its Methods’ Conference, 12-13 July 2010.

Project Members

• Bridget Byrne, University of Manchester
• Jacqui Gabb, Open University
• Joan Haran, Cardiff University
• Niamh Moore, University of Manchester
• Kath Woodward, Open University
• Sophie Woodward, University of Manchester