Welcome to the Feminist Values in Research issue of Gender & Development.

In
May 2018, Gender & Development and the Women and Development Study
Group of the UK Development Studies Association (DSA) co-hosted a seminar of
the same title, to celebrate the journal’s 25th birthday. This issue includes articles
initially presented there, alongside a range of others, commissioned in line with
our usual practice from an open Call for Contributions.

To ensure international development supports women’s rights and gender

equality, it is essential that feminist values infuse and underpin every aspect of
research. Feminist values in research may be understood in a variety of ways.
The overarching goal is to create spaces and opportunities to reveal lived
realities of power inequalities and difference, and provide evidence that can be
deployed in working towards addressing these engrained inequalities. Feminist
values are most often deployed to challenge the continued marginalisation of
poor women and girls from decision-making, resources and opportunities in a
range of contexts. Feminist values and a related focus on ‘gender’ can also allow
us to talk about sexual orientation and gender identities in all their diversity, and
gendered power relations between individuals and groups. Our starting point in
the curation of the workshop that inspired this issue of the journal is that the
research process should reflect feminist values, empowering all who participate
in it.

Research into the gendered nature of development and analysis of its failure to
recognise and/or respond to the differential needs and challenges of women and
men is a critical part of feminist activism and transformation, and this is as true
today as it was when Gender & Development was launched. Above all, feminist
researchers in international development are interested in power: its nature, the
ways it can be wielded, and by whom. We are interested in the effect powerful
institutions and the elites who head them have on gender inequality, the material
effects of which tend disproportionately to affect women and girls living in poverty
in the global South. We want to understand how the slow progress to women’s
equal rights is going, where it is encountering resistance, and how women and
girls – in particular the most marginalised - are finding opportunities to negotiate
with the powerful, find spaces for resistance, and organise for empowerment.
The political project that we all share, to achieve gender equality by asserting full
and equal rights, is about using agency – ‘power to’ and ‘power with’ – to
challenge patriarchal ‘power-over’.

Feminist researchers in international development are working in a space where

there are multiple intersecting relations of power operating concurrently in
interlocking ways, privileging women from high-income countries, white women,
and women from powerful elites and majority groups. Among the first global
feminist research collectives was the pathbreaking Development with Women for
a New era (DAWN) network, which in the 1980s put forward its feminist,
postcolonial analysis of international development. It is this vision that
underpinned the global vision forged at the Fourth World Conference on Women
held in Beijing in 1995. The challenge since has been for the feminist movement
to avoid gender equality and women’s rights goals being co-opted by the
‘mainstream’ in ways that depoliticise feminist struggle, and to ensure that
feminist research nurtures space for the expression of diverse, contextualised
understandings of gendered power imbalances. Gender and Development has
always sought to accommodate these different approaches, whilst striving
ultimately to promote women’s rights and gender equality.

The writers in this issue represent a diverse group of feminists working in

academia, policy research and practice – including monitoring, evaluation and
learning. Each of these different contexts holds specific challenges for feminists,
but the key feminist value underpinning all their research experiences is the aim
of challenging and ending inequality between women and men, affirming women
as expert knowers, marginalised by patriarchal power yet exercising agency in
often constrained circumstances to further their interests and needs, and those of
their dependents.

Both the issue, and the workshop from which it emerges, aim to provide a space
where researchers can reflect upon their own experience of research – as
investigators, participants, practitioners, academics and/or activists – and the
challenges and contradictions they have faced in conducting feminist research,
from practical and organisational barriers and struggles, to ethical and
methodological dilemmas. How does embedding feminist values in research
enable us to navigate and deal with difficult subjects and sensitivities in ways that
might otherwise not be possible? How do feminist research practices enable us
to translate our values into meaningful ways of tackling inequalities, poverty and
exclusion in the global South? The articles here grapple with these issues across
a wide range of different development contexts.

Looking at research through a gendered lens

Historically, educated and predominantly white and Northern male elites have
defined knowledge and learning, placing a high value on research involving
‘objective’ methods seen as removing the dangers of bias, and revealing ‘facts’.
Feminists, however, have highlighted the unconscious bias embedded in these
apparently value-free research methodologies, and the skewed findings that
result from the assumption that researchers can remain neutral and external to
any research process. There has also been a tendency to ignore difference,
instead starting from an assumption that there is nothing distinctive and different
about the experiences of women, girls and non-gender conforming groups – or
that these distinctions and differences between women and men are not
significant or important to analyse and include in findings; the experiences of
men have been assumed to be the norm, from which others deviate.

In international development research, unconscious biases that privilege male,

Western European and US ideas about women and men, and gender roles and
relations, and which reproduced colonial thinking, created early international
development programming that ignored the existence of very different ways of
thinking about sex, gender, family and society, and different divisions of labour
and responsibility in households and communities. When international
development policies misfire, they can do significant harm, as feminists
researching the impact of gender-blind development have shown over four
decades.

International development policies of past decades have had the most

devastating and damaging effects on women and girls who are most distanced
from power and resources, due to other aspects of their identities. This, too, is
currently being acknowledged in ‘mainstream’ international development thinking,
and expressed in global policy commitments. The Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs) reflect a global acknowledgement that complex inequalities
(including but not limited to age, education, religion, ethnicity, caste, and SOGI
[sexual orientation and gender identity]) need to be better understood in order to
ensure they can be challenged by a new generation of development initiatives
informed by intersectional feminist approaches aiming to achieve the aim of the
SDGs, of ‘leaving no-one behind’.

In this issue, authors emphasise the link between who does the research, and
the quality of the findings and analyses that emerge. They are also keen to
emphasise how they interact with the research process, and the challenges this
creates for pursuing feminist research values where they see themselves as part
of, rather than separate to, the research process. Research, like all other human
endeavours, needs to be instigated by individuals and teams with diverse
identities and experiences, to reflect the needs and interests of all in society.
Across much of the global South we see the emergence of a new generation of
committed feminist scholars, and Gender and Development remains a key outlet
in opening up spaces for diverse feminist voices to be heard.

Emerging researchers are building on a literature and a history – or ‘herstory’ – of

activism inside and outside the academy, with University-based researchers
joining forces with feminists working in women’s movements and inside
government and development NGOs of all sizes. Gender inequality and women’s
rights are still goals to be achieved in the future, but it is now much less
acceptable to ignore the need for gender-disaggregated data in large survey
research, or to make assumptions about farmers being male, or assume women
will - indeed, should - perform all the unpaid care work in a community. Feminists
of many different hues – post/decolonial thinkers, feminist economists, feminist
anthropologists among them – have had a profound influence in how we think
about research, the research agendas selected for funding, the methods used,
and the way findings are disseminated. But – as the writers in this issue highlight
– there is still a very long way to go to ensure international development research
achieves feminist outcomes.

Equality, power, and ethics: the importance of self-reflection to

feminist researchers

As we suggested above, a critical element of the feminist research process is for

feminist researchers to reflect on their own position and location in relation to
their research participants, in this case in the global South. Every writer whose
voice is included in this issue considers this question, sharing their self-
reflections on who they are and how their lives have shaped the ways they see
and understand the world around them. While earlier generations of researchers
in both the natural and social sciences strove to attain ‘objectivity’, seeing the
idea that they may be biased as a flaw and something to be challenged – and
denied – feminist researchers reject the idea that objectivity is attainable, seeing
it instead as important to develop as sophisticated a sense of their own biases as
is possible.

Feminists’ focus on these issues has put them at the forefront of research ethics
and allied them to proponents of participatory, iconoclastic approaches to
research1, challenging notions of development as something done by experts and
highly educated professionals, to people in so-called developing countries who
lack material resources and essential services. Such participatory approaches, at
their best, open up the possibility of developing research that responds to, and
emerges from, the needs of marginalised groups and communities, involving
them in conceiving and undertaking research that they and their allies can deploy
to effect meaningful change on the ground.

Feminist praxis2demands that we try, where possible, to equalise the relationship

between researchers and the research subjects – people whose lives are being
researched. Taken to its logical conclusion, these two categories should become
one and the same, with participants undertaking action research into their own
experiences and knowledge. There may be a role for an outsider to work with
them, but this relationship is far from the traditional one familiar to formally
educated, technically-trained ‘experts’, who extract data and present it in
technical, often highly abstract and theoretical terms, accessible only to others
with similar levels of formal education. In these projects, the role of the outsider
may be to train participants in an unfamiliar technology that they will use to
record the data, and to work with them to develop appropriate, context specific
analytical tools to make sense of it. The outsider may also facilitate access to
decision-makers – for example, government officials in charge of budgets who
could change women’s lives for the better if they are exposed to the research
findings.

In this issue, several authors discuss experiences of this kind where the research
data itself – and the direction the project takes as the data mounts up - is
determined and controlled by the research participants. The role of the
researcher transforms from an expert harvesting ‘raw data’, to an enabler of a
project where participants themselves explore and analyse their knowledge,
creating a finished ‘product’ to share, aiming to further their own priorities through
influencing power-holders and decision-makers. In her article, Elsa Oliveira offers
a personal reflection on the journey she took into research with sex worker
migrants in South Africa, where she uses participatory arts-based methods:

What I most enjoy about the research process is the opportunity to listen to
stories, and the possibility of making a difference through active listening and
witnessing. In my opinion, feminist and participatory research traditions facilitate
communication and exchange, and have values that extend beyond simply
expanding academic knowledge. We should therefore not treat academic work
as constitutively different from activism, but rather conceptualise research
processes as political practices
(this issue, 524)

Leva Rouhani’s article discusses the experience of working with rural women
involved in Mothers’ Associations to promote girls’ education in Benin, West
Africa. Women used digital story-telling as their method of relating and analysing
their experiences and articulating their priorities at workshops, advocating for
adult literacy classes as well as changing attitudes in the community about the
factors that affect girls’ education. Leva Rouhani says:

As a feminist researcher committed to collaborative methods and challenging the

power dynamics between myself and the participants, my goal was to support
participants to take ownership over the research process, giving them agency
and support to identify challenges and facilitate critical reflection
(this issue, 584)

These are inspiring case studies of innovative feminist research and practice. Yet
these writers - and others in the issue - would be first to say that it may not be
possible to ever entirely succeed in equalising the power relationship between
professional researchers located in academic, policy and practice research
institutions, and women and girls living in contexts deemed to be resource-poor,
fragile and conflict affected, or in some other way needing the intervention of
international development policymakers and practitioners. Indeed, reflecting on
researchers’ own role and complicity in this global system is critical in order to try
to become part of the solution, But there is always an element of double-think in
this for anyone involved in research who is located in a position of relative power
in a university, a large development NGO, government organisation or policy
think-tank. Nevertheless, much can be achieved through respectful collaboration.
While researchers continue to work with women and girls as well as non-gender
conforming groups in poverty, the articles reflect the way in which feminist
researchers continually challenge themselves in relation to rebalancing or
softening such complex but unequal power relations.

Feminist lead researchers also have to consider similar issues in relation to the
members of their research teams: local staff employed as translators, research
assistants, enumerators, and translators. The knowledge and insights of these
local staff are often appropriated and presented in research findings under the
names of lead researchers, whose careers flourish in an international context
where their prospects and their bargaining power as professionals are both
starkly different from the local staff who have given so much to the work. In these
relationships, feminist lead researchers need to ‘walk their talk’ on partnership
and challenge the norms and conventions of research that are rooted in colonial
and post-colonial racism.

In relation to this point, the article by Dashakti Reddy, Clare Hollowell, Lona
Liong Charles Aresto, Nyaboi Grace, Mängu Bande Joseph, Joseph Aleu Mayen
Ker, Jane Lado and Kiden Mary in this issue offers interesting insights into the
need to ensure feminist research tools reflect an awareness of intersectionality –
specifically, the ways that culture and race intersect with feminism. The first-
named writers are two ‘expatriate’ researchers who led research into gender-
based violence in South Sudan. The research relied significantly on a team of
local researchers, with whom the piece is co-authored, and the two ‘expatriate’
team leaders were keen to create spaces for the research team to collectively
address the possible stress induced by the experience of researching GBV in
South Sudan. Yet local researchers‘ ways of dealing with this stress were very
different. Instead of using the spaces created for sharing emotional responses as
they were intended, local researchers saw them as valuable for building
professionalism, enabling them to respond appropriately to the traumatising
stories they heard. The article emphasises that feminist principles, tools and
practices cannot be taken-for-granted but also need to be interrogated from a
critical perspective, fully conscious that they may reflect ways of thinking that fail
to respond to the realities of local researchers. Once again, we are reminded of
the importance of closing the distance between researchers, research
participants and research support staff, a point also taken up by Loksee Leung,
Stephanie Miedema, Xian Warner, Sarah Homan, and Emma Fulu in their article
in this issue. They emphasise that their feminist principles extended to tackling
under-representation of women in researcher roles through prioritising the use of
women local researchers, and providing extensive training to their collaborators
on the ground.

Researching sensitive issues from a feminist perspective

Because the ‘personal is political’, and many of the issues of most critical
importance to women concern issues that have historically been seen as private,
and/or sources of stigma or shame, a key focus of feminist researchers is to
research these topics and air them, asserting the importance of exposing them to
public debate. Research into violence against women (VAWG) and gender-
based violence (GBV) is an obvious example of naming and exploring the
dimensions of a social issue affecting all women, whether or not they directly
experience this violence themselves; knowledge that it is a possibility shapes
women’s and girls’ lives in countless ways. The ramifications of researching
VAWG in a fragile, conflict-affected context is discussed in this issue by Dashakti
Reddy et al, who focus particularly on the impact on local researchers, as
described in the last section.

Mirna Guha researches the lives of women formerly and currently involved in sex
work in Kolkata, India. Mirna Guha came from a development practitioner
perspective to her academic research. She considers the ways in which
insider:outsider distinctions are often blurred, and the multiple, overlapping
positionalities that we all occupy as researchers, a theme that cuts across all the
papers in this issue. Her article begins with a discussion of the exclusion of sex
workers from the mainstream feminist movement, and their marginalisation from
policy discussions on VAWG. Perspectives on women selling sex are, as she
says, ‘sharply divided’ in feminist movements from Anglo-American traditions –
and many feminists with that heritage are currently working in international
development. Some radical feminists see the act of a man purchasing the use of
a woman’s body as a patriarchal act of dominance: a form of violence against
women. For other feminists, sex work is just that: work undertaken by women
whose right to choose to do this should not be in question. In international
development, policies and programming reflect both these positions.

The nuanced accounts of women sex workers are critical to better inform those
with responsibility and power to determine policies around sex work. But it is a
challenge to present these in ways that allow the diversity and range of views of
different individuals and groups to cut through. One response is to consciously
choose research methods which allow for sustained narrative voice from
participants, who can then tell their stories in their own words. For Mirna Guha,
using life histories within an open-ended ethnographic research approach
allowed the possibility:

… to move away from standard topics associated with sex work. It also allows
women in sex work to share their accounts of the dynamism and fluidity within
their lives, within and before/after sex work.
(this issue, 506)

Spending time with women, ‘ethnographically “hanging out”’ ( ibid.) preceded

more formal interviews, to build trust and rapport with them. Women expressed
surprise that the conversations and interviews touched on subjects and came
from angles that they did not expect from researchers. Many communities in the
global South are well-acquainted with social science researchers scrutinising
their lives, but many of the topics that feminists ask about – sex, violence, the
drudgery of unpaid care work and women’s thoughts on marriage and other
topics – are still unexpected topics to be expected to discuss with anyone beyond
close friends and neighbours. Feminist principles of equality and reciprocity
informed Mirna Guha’s decision to make the process of research questioning a
two-way one. The women involved in her research quizzed her on issues of her
own personal life. Teasing, cracking jokes, and smoking together created a
relationship that subverted the power dynamics of traditional interviewing.

Asking questions about sensitive subjects is just one aspect of deciding how to
produce research that minimises harm to respondents. Crucially, Mirna Guha
also reminds us of the need to sometimes be silent as researchers, and also the
importance of establishing boundaries that ensure both our participants’ and our
own wellbeing. A related issue is around the use of pseudonyms and anonymity
in the writing up of research. In her article, Rebecca Gordon compares the advice
given to her by the authorities at her university with her own thinking about the
question of anonymising the views of women she interviewed in Bihar, India.
‘Why would I want to be anonymous?’ asked one participant, wanting to have her
words included together with her name. Her views would then be clearly her own.

As Rebecca Gordon says, feminist researchers anxious not to appropriate

knowledge may well feel that giving credit to research participants by naming
them is a positive thing. What emerges here is the acknowledgement that the
ethical standards to which we must strictly adhere if we are to have projects
‘approved’ by our institutions are not always appropriate in the field. Instead,
issues are best resolved by paying adequate attention to the views of women
involved in the research, and giving them decision-making power, along with
sufficient information for them to be fully informed about the consequences of
these decisions. As Elsa Oliveira (this issue) observes of her own project's
process:

It is about making sure that participants have a say in the ways they are
represented, and how the research unfolds, but also at the same time, it is about
recognising that it may not be equitable to assume that participants have the
same investment or interest in research and/or its significance and value.
(this issue, 536)