Introduction: Feminist values in research

Abstract

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 25 th 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 girlsin 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'.

Exploring Subsistence Marketplaces Through a Feminist Perspective

“…However, discussion of gender is restricted to references to a biological sex difference with descriptive explanations of marketplace exchanges; such discussion is necessary but insufficient to understand the complex role of gender within the subsistence marketplace context. It is also in sharp contrast to the way in which feminist perspectives conceptualize gender in its explanatory sense: as a social construction including male, female and gender non-conforming groups (Connell, 2002;Jenkins et al, 2019). In other words, gender must be examined as a sociological category highlighting ingrained inequality between individuals and groups.…”

Open Science and Feminist Ethics: Promises and Challenges of Open Access

“…Critical questions must be raised to identify and name systemic inequalities, even if they cannot be fully changed. For example, Jenkins et al (2019) describe research in the global context and assert that it may not be possible to equalize the power relationships between university-or institute-based researchers and women and girls who are living in resourcepoor countries. And yet, if there is respectful collaboration and if feminist researchers continually engage in reflexivity and try, to the extent possible, they may rebalance and reduce some of the inevitable unequal power relations.…”

“…However, they have been critiqued for merely adopting the masculine, individualistic, competitive model of "power over" rather than "power with." As Jenkins et al (2019) argue, "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'" (p. 415). In Women and Power: A Manifesto, the feminist classicist, Mary Beard (2017), traces how power has been gendered since Homer's Odyssey.…”

Early marriage and displacement�a conversation: how Syrian daughters, mothers and mothers-in-law in Jordan understand marital decision-making

“…A dialogical set-up is more than instrumental-it is also the outcome of the feminist approach to ethnographic research that we are committed to. By this, we understand an exploration of factors that contribute to women's oppression, while remaining sensitive to the ethnographic process itself (Brooks & Hesse-Biber 2006, Jenkins et al 2019, Lokot 2019. There is no denying that research with vulnerable populations, especially when facilitated by humanitarian actors, involves power inequalities between refugees and academics (Sukarieh & Tannock 2019), but we tried to address these in various ways.…”