No abstract

No abstract

Despite the ‗objectivity' requisite of classic positivist approaches for the research to be considered as ‗scientific', feminist research stresses the impact of researchers' positionality within knowledge production and criticizes the emphasis on neutrality for a scientific inquiry. Feminists have explored the power relations within the research and discussed the researchers' positionholding an insider and/or outsider positionalityin terms of their complex relations of power. This examination requires elaboration on reflexivity, a critical stance in feminist research that stresses the situatedness of knowledge, which has a significant potential to eliminate the hierarchy within the research and to reconcile the dichotomy between academia and activism. Thus, this study focuses on the dynamics within the feminist qualitative research, particularly interviewing, the notion of reflexivity, the discussions of researchers' insider and/or outsider status and how feminist reflexivity can be used as a tool to form a bridge between academia/activism binary.

Throughout different waves of feminisms, women have called attention to sexist political and social norms across countries. Starting from the first wave feminist demands of suffrage to third wave’s intersectional feminist politics, women activists have struggled to achieve gender equality in different contexts. With an emphasis on intersected identities, fourth wave feminism, also called digital feminism, endeavours to implement third wave’s concepts in the digital space, via blogs, websites, social media platforms. In Turkey, in the second decade of the 2000s, women have started to extensively use social media to combat patriarchy, particularly violence against women and femicide, and to increase communication and solidarity among women in line with the political opportunity structures in the country. Through digital platforms, women stimulate political change by exposing gendered discourses. However, due to government’s increased control on digital spaces, activists’ capacity to alter the social gendered structure has been limited. Nevertheless, digital spaces still have a great potential to work as counterpublics for marginalised groups, such as women.