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Feminist research acknowledges the centrality of female knowledge and experience. Within this two further strands can be identified: that many feminist researchers place an emphasis on the social construction of meaning, with particular emphasis on the role of language as the primary vehicle of such constructions; and that within the centrality of female knowledge and experience is a feminist analysis of the role of power in determining the form and representation of social knowledge. The latter is an acknowledgement that feminist research is not just an extension of traditional research in non‐sexist ways and areas of relevance to women but that it must entail a critical evaluation of the research process in terms of its ability to illuminate women's experiences. This should comprise three strands — a critique of traditional theories and methods, the development of more appropriate theories and methods for studying the experience of women and the analysis of the role of the researcher within his/her research.

I am the oldest daughter from a family of five girls. I was born in the 1950s and had my first real encounters with feminism as a social movement during the second wave women's liberation movement in the United States in the 1970s. This movement had an important impact on me. Despite the appeal of the women's movement for me, I lived a powerfully gendered life. I had not been allowed to read The Lord of the rings series in school because I was a girl. I detested Barbie dolls and yet was sentenced to hours of play with them if I was to have any social life at all. I had to pretend that I neither liked nor was competent at math and science. My high school boyfriend was paying me a compliment when decades after high school he told me, “At least you never let on that you were smart. I always appreciated that about you.” When I attended the first day of a basic calculus class at a public university in 1981, the professor announced, “No female has ever passed a class with me.” In 1983, I was reprimanded by my elementary school principal for wearing slacks to teach. This was reminiscent of my childhood days when my parents finally, but only, allowed me to wear trousers to school on Fridays. In 1990, my 5-year-old daughter told me, “Well, mom, everyone knows boys are smarter than girls” (of course she has since changed her mind!).

In the United States, rights-based laws have opened major social institutions to previously marginalized groups, altering the terrain on which social movements act, creating opportunities for disruption, and expanding the forms protest takes. This research is an attempt to add to our understanding of contemporary protest. I use data from 50 open-ended, loosely structured interviews with women feminist PhD sociologists working at U.S. (and 1 Canadian) colleges and universities as a lens through which to examine contemporary protest. These in-depth interviews reveal that the demand-making and discursive protest of feminists in academia is rooted in the empowering intersections of their collective feminist identities and disrupts hegemonic practices in the academy and beyond. My findings indicate that social movement theory must move beyond restrictive notions of potential movement targets, activist locations, and strategies; and past narrow conceptualizations of collective action and movement goals.

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.

This paper seeks to critique recent research on gender and accounting to explore how feminist methodology can move on and radicalise the gender agenda in the accounting context.

After examining current research on gender and accounting, the paper explores the nature of feminist methodology and its relation to epistemology. It explores three inter‐related tenets of feminist methodology in detail: power and politics, subjectivity and reflexivity.

The paper suggests that much research in the accounting is concerned with gender‐as‐a‐variable, rather than being distinctly feminist, thus missing the opportunity to radicalise the agenda. It makes suggestions for how a feminist approach to methodology could be applied to the accounting context.

The paper calls for a wider application of a feminist approach to accounting research and gives suggestions as to where this might be applied.

To provide examples of qualitative research based on feminist epistemological assumptions. Such research re‐invents rather than recycles management theory, producing alternative understandings which speak to the demands of managing post‐corporate workplaces characterised by growing levels of diversity and rapid discontinuous change.

Reports on three feminist qualitative research projects. Describes research processes and outcomes which aim to reflexively attend to diverse voices and researcher and research participant subjectivities.

Provides tangible examples of empirical feminist qualitative research, including discussions of how the research was conducted, the nature of the findings and critical reflections on the extent to which the researchers' feminist epistemological assumptions were enacted.

The three research projects discussed have all been conducted within the Australian education sector. Accordingly, future research could focus on providing practical examples of feminist qualitative research approaches in the management field, in different international and industrial/sector contexts.

Provides management researchers with three examples of feminist qualitative research covering diverse topics including leadership, mentoring and ethics.

While there is a plethora of writing concerned with feminist research generally, there is a dearth of feminist research in the management field specifically. This paper's contribution therefore lies in providing tangible examples of feminist qualitative research in the management field.

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.

This paper seeks to establish and demonstrate the relevance of feminist research methods within built environment research. While no one definition of feminist research exists, many feminist researchers identify characteristics which distinguish it from traditional social science research; it is research that studies women, or that focuses on gender.

There is a growing body of research into women and the built environment adopting feminist paradigms. This paper explains the dynamic, evolving philosophical basis of feminist research methods drawing comparisons to traditional positivist methodologies and demonstrates that feminist research has characteristics that can be imported into other research paradigms.

The paper shows that there is much to be learned from an understanding of feminist research for all researchers in the built environment and that by adopting different approaches to research, researchers may find new and original ways of examining complex issues.

The implications are that all researchers in the built environment should consider the benefits of adopting a feminist approach in their research especially where the researcher is seeking to gain a deeper understanding of peoples' experiences.

This paper seeks to raise awareness of the benefits of adopting feminist research methods in a discipline dominated by traditional approaches to research.

This paper aims to offer an account of the research process and reflects on feminist research practice. It discusses methodological issues based on the author's experience as a PhD student in sociology carrying out fieldwork with women in Latin America. The paper makes the research process transparent and shows how feminist epistemologies inform the research strategies the author used in the field.

This is a reflexive piece about the methodology and method used and the dilemmas encountered in the author's empirical work as a feminist doctoral researcher. It considers biographical issues and personal interests in relation to the research.

The article discusses methodological assumptions and feminist epistemologies. It examines the interview as a research method as well as interviewing skills. It reflects on research practice, considering power issues, feminist challenges in the field, and the topic of reflexivity and otherness.

The article provides an account of feminist research practice, and considers the roles and skills of the researcher when interviewing. It contributes to knowledge by providing real examples of feminist research in Latin America.

Purpose – Recent theoretical analyses examining the intersection of race, class, and gender have resulted in exciting new epistemological frameworks in the social sciences. However, feminist researchers have yet to articulate concrete strategies for capturing this intersectionality empirically.

Methodology – On the basis of ethnographic research conducted in Cuba, we build on previous feminist epistemological insights and begin to develop methodological strategies that can be used to capture the intersection of race, class, and gender in the context of cross-cultural research.

Findings – The major contribution of our work is the articulation of theoretical insights into methodological guidelines that can guide research both inside the United States, the site where much of this theorizing takes place, and beyond our borders.

Research limitations – The primary limitation of our research is the lack of collaboration with Cuban researchers. Given the political rancor between the United States and Cuba, and limitations on their academic freedom, is difficult to work with Cuban scholars without compromising their security. Cuban scholars who are critical of the state are fearful of potential reprisals.

Originality – Nonetheless, our work provides a unique analysis of how to capture the intersection of race, class, and gender empirically from a cross-cultural perspective.