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This paper aims to provide a brief overview of the ethical challenges facing researchers engaging with web archival materials and demonstrates a framework and method for conducting research with historical web data created by young people.

This paper’s methodology is informed by the conceptual framing of data materials in research on the “right to be forgotten” (Crossen-White, 2015; GDPR, 2018; Tsesis, 2014), data afterlives (Agostinho, 2019; Stevenson and Gehl, 2019; Sutherland, 2017), indigenous data sovereignty and governance (Wemigwans, 2018) and feminist ethics of care (Cifor et al., 2019; Cowan, 2020; Franzke et al., 2020; Luka and Millette, 2018). It demonstrates a new method called an archive promenade, which builds on the walkthrough and scroll-back methods (Light et al., 2018; Robards and Lincoln, 2017).

The archive promenades demonstrate how individual attachments to digital traces vary and are often unpredictable, which necessitates further steps to ensure that privacy and data sovereignty are maintained through research with web archives.

This paper demonstrates how the archive promenade methodological intervention can lead to better practices of care with sensitive web materials and brings together previous work on ethical fabrications (Markham, 2012), speculation (Luka and Millette, 2018) and thick context (Marzullo et al., 2018), to yield new insights for research on the experiences of growing up online.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of dilemmas that emerge at the theoretical and practical interfaces of ethnographic fieldwork and feminist advocacy. This is done by examining the researcher’s role in the field and the complex relationships between the researcher and the researched.

Critical self-reflections and autoethnographic analyses of fieldwork experiences in the author’s home country in South Asia are used to explore these dilemmas.

Using situated examples from a typical organisational setting involving both the oppressive and the oppressed, the researcher’s participant observation is found to be conflicted between critical participation and critical observation. Conscious and/or unconscious critical participation through enactment of feminist ethics by combining researcher and advocacy roles allows a route to assuage these conflicts. Practical strategies used to accomplish this are also discussed.

Although the practical strategies discussed in this paper are culturally and organisationally specific and hence limited by them, it is hoped that suitable variants will emerge for readers from their discussion. Further research is needed to investigate the variety of ways in which the researcher-advocate positionality proposed in this paper can be strategically adopted conditional on cultural and organisational contexts, feminist research questions, and researchers’ abilities and constraints.

This paper seeks to shed light on the dilemmas of feminist ethics faced by critical feminist researchers conducting ethnographic fieldwork. It also discusses ways to enable researchers to circumvent these dilemmas in both epistemologically productive ways by collecting rich data and in ontologically enriching ways by allowing some enactment of feminist ethics. To this end, a positionality of the feminist researcher-advocate is conceptualised that does not enforce constraints of extreme positionalities of either a conventional ethnographer or an action researcher.

Besides illustrating the need to stretch beyond traditional boundaries of participant observation, the researcher-advocate positionality also allows feminist researchers to make small, but directly tangible impact towards gender equality in their field setting. Implications for researchers’ emotional, and cognitive safety are also discussed especially when they identify with one or more minority identities.

This paper contributes to discussions on the theory of methods by highlighting the benefits of enacting feminist ethics as a way of critical participation in research settings.

Feminist legal activists in law schools developed what we call critical community tactics beginning in the late 1960s to bring about important cultural change in the legal educational arena. These feminist activists challenged the male-dominant culture and succeeded in making law schools and legal scholarship more gender inclusive. Here, we develop the critical community tactics concept and show how these tactics produce cultural products which ultimately, as they are integrated into the broader culture, change the cultural landscape. Our work then is a study of how social movement activists can bring about cultural change. The feminist legal activists’ cultural products and the integration of them into the legal academy provide evidence of feminist legal activist success in shifting the legal institutional culture. We conclude that critical community tactics provide an important means for social movement activists to bring about cultural change, and scholars examining social movement efforts in other institutional settings may benefit from considering the role of critical community tactics.

Historically, a major focus of women's health research has been on the increasing medicalization of “natural” reproductive processes, with early feminist scholarship in this area largely critical of this trend. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to explore the various ways that women actually experience medicalization. We suggest that current feminist scholarship on medicalization and childbirth remains limited in two ways: (1) much of this research still focuses on privileged women and neglects the experiences of women at various social locations, as well as how oppression and privilege shape those experiences and (2) existing literature does not operationalize what medicalization or “natural” reproductive processes mean for individual women. More specifically, feminist scholars have not investigated systematically how diverse women define and experience their births within the context of a taken-for-granted definitional dichotomy of “natural” versus “medical” birth that characterizes much of the classic and contemporary feminist literature. In this chapter, we explore women's different discussions of “natural” birth and, by default, learn about their definitions of medicalization as well. Drawing from a critical, comparative analysis of qualitative, empirical data gathered from three different groups of childbearing women in two studies – that is, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a hospital setting, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a birthing center setting, and poor African American teen mothers birthing in a hospital setting – we propose a new methodological and conceptual framework for re-examining the meanings of “natural” versus “medical” birth experiences and pushing beyond a strictly gender-based analysis.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce queer feminist cultural studies methodologies. For illustrative purposes, the chapter draws upon one specific study of locker room space undertaken by the author.

Design/methodology/approach – The design of the locker room study is delineated, including methods of data collection and analysis: self-reflective narratives, interviews, text and discourse analysis. Issues of contextualisation and insight into the use of queer feminist cultural studies methodologies to study normative geographies are foregrounded.

Findings – Findings acknowledge the systems of knowledge production that cohere around gendered and (hetero)sexed normative and non-normative bodies in locker room spaces.

Research implications – There is no quintessential queer methodology, which is a drawback to researchers trying to forge their way in this area. Instead, all interrogations and interpretations start from a critique of the (hetero)normative discourses and practices of gender and sexuality that take place at the expense of non-normative experiences.

Originality – The chapter provides an overview of queer feminist cultural studies theories and methodologies, for those unfamiliar with this post-positivist and counter-hegemonic approach. The author suggests that queer feminist cultural studies methodologies provoke us to ask the following questions: What new thoughts does my work make possible to think? What new emotions does my work make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open up for diverse subjectivities? Such questions take researchers in new and exciting directions.

This chapter explores the potential for the classroom to be a space for activism and hope within the contemporary business school. Drawing on the extant literature, a reflexive account of our own teaching and learning practice, and a small number of interviews with academics using feminist material in their teaching in business schools, we explore the challenges, opportunities and joys experienced in the feminist classroom. We suggest that engaging in feminist teaching practice and theory can offer an opportunity for academics to engage in the critical management studies practice which is often said to be lacking within management research. We begin by setting out the extant positioning of Critical Management Studies, moving to an analysis of the educational context. Interwoven through this are our own perspectives. Our own reflections do not reveal the identities of students.

This paper introduces a new approach to theorising and learning from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) women’s experiences of inequality in academia. It offers a versatile model with which the structure of a particular racist-sexist inequality regime can be theorised from empirical evidence.

The paper presents composite, fictionalised accounts of intersectional discrimination which are then analysed through critical realist frameworks, employing critical race feminist theory insights. This novel “whisper network” method centres the knowledge of BAME women in academia, and is translatable to other marginalised actors, offering a more protective means by which to access their knowledge as a foundation for organisational change.

Through theorising the ontological arrangement of key causal mechanisms responsible for the reproduction of inequality regimes, the paper illuminates links between micro-level intersectional discrimination and meso-level institutional inequality.

In order to preserve anonymity and reduce potential backlash, the vignettes in this paper are not intended to precisely capture specific empirical realities, but instead reflect wider patterns from the author's own whisper network knowledge. Nonetheless, the analytical method developed here could be applied to rigorously collected empirical data, with clear implications for improving organisational practice.

The paper offers a structured and systematic process by which qualitative data on institutional inequality can be analysed and stakeholders engaged to develop and propose solutions, even by individuals new to the field.

A methodical basis for strategic action addressing the issues revealed through such an analysis can be developed in order to galvanise and steer organisational change.

The novelty of the paper is twofold: in its original synthesis of critical realist depth ontology and ontological insights from critical race feminist theory about social structures of oppression, and in the development of the innovative “whisper network” method based upon a critical race theory counter-storytelling epistemology, in conversation with the emergent stream of literature within feminist organisation studies regarding the importance of “writing differently”.

This chapter will explore how different feminist theories and theorists have informed what counts as research, what is defined as a research issue, and methodological approaches to research in higher education. It will consider the theoretical and methodological tools feminist academics have mobilized in order to develop more powerful explanations of how gender and other forms of difference work in the relation to the positioning of the individual, higher education and the nation state within globalized economies. It pays particular regard to the feminist political project of social justice.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the “double-jeopardy” in widely adopted women’s leadership development interventions aimed at “fixing” women, explore critical feminist coaching (CFC) perspectives and practices and offer more equitable and just alternatives for developing women leaders.

This paper includes a literature review of post-feminist and critical feminist perspectives and a critical examination of coaching for women leaders from each perspective.

Postfeminist approaches in organizations are little scrutinized because of the dominant postfeminist discourse that women's subordination and oppression have been “resolved” through neoliberal, individualistic interventions, such as postfeminist coaching programs. Infusing the message of “fixing women” through emphasizing “4 C’s” – confidence, control, courage and competition – postfeminist coaching programs have been submitting women leaders to “double jeopardy.” The authors critique this postfeminist coaching paradox from a critical feminist perspective foregrounding “4 R’s” – reflecting, reforming, raising and rebuilding – promising more equitable, just development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to describe CFC and presentation of a conceptual and practical model of the process. The authors define postfeminist coaching as the disavowal of feminist values and failure to challenge gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors propose a model of CFC defined as the explicit embrace of feminist values and challenge of gender hegemony in the coaching process. The authors offer alternatives for developing women leaders amid paradoxical, complex, capitalist systems, with a critical lens challenging postfeminism.