Collaborative feminist research methods in practice
by Nupur Samuel and Anna CohenMiller
On behalf of the Research Team: Tamsin Hinton-Smith (UK Country Lead and Principal Investigator), Fawzia Mazanderani (UK Research Assistant), Olapeju Aiyelaagbe (Nigeria Country Lead), Uko Idorenyin (Nigeria Research Assistant), Kholoud Kahime (Morocco Country Lead), Fabrice Shurweryimana (Morocco Research Assistant), Aray Saniyazova (Kazakhstan Research Assistant), Abhinav Anand (India Research Assistant)
We began an international research study aiming to understand and address gender (in)equity in higher education across five country contexts - UK, Nigeria, Morocco, Kazakhstan, and India.
The goals from the beginning were to bring together scholars who had critical methodological lenses, focusing our study through a collaborative feminist methodological lens to explore and address gender-based inequities in higher education institutions.
Asking ourselves critically self-reflection questions offer a means to create socially just research. So, we can ask, What is the need to reimagine higher education spaces?
Higher education provides a bridge for young adults before they step into the world of commerce: it is the transitioning phase from being a student to being a responsible member of society. Till this point, these students have gathered information and knowledge to begin to contribute to global discussions on a variety of issues; they are yet to engage with the world in its many facets by ensuring ethical practices are adopted in formal and informal spaces, of home and work. Thus, the experience people gain while they are part of higher education goes a long way in shaping how they interact with the world and contribute to the ideals of a just and equitable society. By ensuring that gender sensitive practices are inherent across disciplines and curriculum design, it is hoped that these will positively influence a person’s outlook towards gender issues, enabling them to follow these practices when they step into more responsible roles elsewhere.
Despite the significant impact of gender on social change and social justice, it often receives little urgency or critical attention. Gender exists at the intersections of various social, economic, and political factors impacting micro and macro level discourse in academic and non-academic spheres. The ways in which we interact are situated within our cultural and gendered context, suggesting a particular way of being. The institutions in which we work, study, and research are also gendered, meaning for instance that the ways in which people respond to one another is also gendered and often replicate systems of exclusion and discrimination, such as the gender pay gap.
The research approaches we adopted while conducting the British Academy Grant Global Challenges Research Fund project and for the associated outlets, including an award-winning book (open-access free to download) are framed within the feminist epistemological perspective and integrate collaborative feminist methods. Included in the book is a chapter about our approaches, methodologies and methods: Co-creating cross-cultural approaches to gender mainstreaming in higher education: Experiences and challenges in developing an interdisciplinary, international feminist knowledge-exchange research approach.
Our focus was to highlight the relationship between gender, social justice to decolonize higher education spaces that have the potential to be places of reinvigoration and hope for a more just world. We adopted feminist research methods emphasizing collaboration, listening and hearing, feedback, encouragement, and various methods of discussion and interaction over synchronous and asynchronous means. We sought to examine and explore the intersectionality of various factors and concluded by providing recommendations that present themselves through dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders in the higher education institutions in the five countries representing spaces in frequently privileged and also overlooked or historically marginalized spaces.
The resultant toolkit is a prime example of how feminist research methods can be adopted to create praxis-oriented recommendations.
Included in the toolkit Gender on the Higher Education Learning Agenda Internationally: Co-Constructing Foundations for Equitable Futures are links to our survey questions, interview questions, focus group questions for the team members and analysis tools. We hope that these will be borrowed, adopted and adapted by those interested in creating gender equitable spaces in higher education.
More Methodspace Posts about Gender and Research
The goals for this collaborative feminist research project were to bring together scholars who had critical methodological lenses, focusing our study through a collaborative feminist methodological lens to explore and address gender-based inequities in higher education institutions. Find the open-access book and toolkit the co-authors created.