* apologies for cross-posting*

Feminist, Queer and Critical Race Tool Kits? Sharing and Exploring Research Methodological Models

Call for Panelists, American Association of Geographers meeting

April 5-9 2017, Boston, MA

Panel Organizers: Heather McLean (University of Glasgow, Glasgow), Leslie Kern (Mount Allison University, Sackville)

Discussant: Brenda Parker (University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago)

Please send a brief description of your interest in the session and what you would like to speak about to: Heather McLean ([log in to unmask]) or Leslie Kern ([log in to unmask]) by October 1st. We will notify accepted panelists by October 7th.

Over the years, intersectional feminist scholars have critiqued urban research for reproducing a combination of “patriarchy, privilege, and positivism” (Parker, 2016). Political economy tends to relegate an interrogation of difference to the periphery of research, positioning it as something that can be approached after the real political issues have been dealt with (Roy, 2015). In order to address these imbalances and silences, feminist urban researchers have drawn from critical race, queer, post-colonial research, and activist and arts-based practices to craft innovative methodological “tool-kits” that enable intersectional and materialist analyses. As Parker (2016) asserts, “diverse theoretical tools can produce sharper, fuller observations and explanations. They can chart sometimes subterranean power relations, along with opportunities for activist intervention.” Such work adds nuance to our understanding of the constitutive role of gender, ability, sexuality, and race in shaping urban politics as well as the actions and attitudes of state and corporate actors and the workings of capital (Wright, 2006; McDowell, 2008). Often crafted from the ground up through sustained, embodied, and caring observation of everyday life lived in place, such methodological approaches uncover how people negotiate, re-work, and resist hegemonic urban policies, as well as forge affinities and alliances across diverse sites and scales.

 

Our intention for this session is to offer an opportunity for urban researchers to share their analytical methodological approaches or toolkits. How do we craft hybrid tools for approaching “the urban” as messy, contradictory, and continually shaping and shaped by difference? How can inventive and place-sensitive toolkits help to decenter normative categories and binary logics in order to challenge the relations they hide as well as the oppressions they naturalize (Buckley and Strauss 2016)? Can our toolkits include ways to use our time and access to resources to work towards more hopeful and care-full urban futures while taking into account very real tensions, contradictions, and structural forces?

 

For this session, we’ll ask panelists to reflect on:

·      What tools, tool kits or models they use in their research

·      Challenges faced as they approach research with these strategies

·      Advantages of hybrid approaches

·      Putting feminist and other hybrid approaches in conversation with more typical political economy frameworks

·      How we can be responsive to communities and respondents through innovative methodological and theoretical models