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This chapter analyzes the critical move in feminist scholarship to gender the discourse on risk mediation in dangerous ethnographic fieldwork, particularly in social justice research. Additionally, I draw on a reflexive analysis of my own fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico, to examine the intersectional impact of social location (gender, race, class, etc.) on risk management.

I synthesize key literature contributions in social science and feminist scholarship on doing dangerous fieldwork. Ethnographic data includes three months of participant observation and interviews with participants of the 2006 Oaxacan uprising.

I argue that the following themes represent axes of gendered risk mediation in social justice fieldwork: (1) the intersectional impact of social location on varied risks and the mediation of those risks, (2) impression management as an important tool for risk mediation, and (3) ethical dilemmas within risk mediation. The key dangers and risks in fieldwork include physical danger, emotional/psychological impacts, risk to research participants, ethical dangers, separation from family through international work, risk of imprisonment, and academic/professional risk.

Analysis of personal experience in the field is limited to this one researcher’s experience; however, it mirrors key themes present in the literature. Reflexive analysis of social location on risk mediation is part of a continued call by feminist ethnographers to research practical risk mediation techniques and recognize the intersectional impacts of social location on fieldwork.

This chapter provides insights that instructors of ethnographic methods might use to discuss dangerous fieldsites and how to mediate risk.

A failure to recognize risk in ethnographic research may disproportionately impact researchers most susceptible to particular risks.

Although feminist scholarship has long examined social location in fieldwork, analysis of risk management is limited. Additionally, this chapter adds to this scholarship by contributing key themes that unite the available research and a list of most-often discussed risks in fieldwork.

Purpose – This chapter will discuss strategies of feminist research that can best be applied to globalized gender studies.

Approach – These strategies work with the premise that women and men are not homogeneous categories that can be used for simple comparisons. They are divided by national allegiances, social class statuses, and racial ethnic identities as well as by gender. Individuals have more than one status, and these statuses intersect and impact on each other. When some or all of these statuses are in disadvantaged groups, the result of this intersectionality of disadvantaged statuses is complex inequality. Feminist scholarship has to be able to work with multiple categories and multiple identities in examining the causes of and remedies for complex inequality.

The concept of gender in intersectional research alludes to a social status equivalent to other advantaged and disadvantaged social statuses. I contrast the premises of gender feminism and woman's feminism to show the development of the concept of gender as social structural, rather than just individual, interactive, and relational.

Findings – Useful strategies in the new directions in feminist research that are intersectional and global are the following: using more than one set of opposites, recognizing subjects’ multiple identities and status dilemmas, analyzing the effects of intersectionality on complex inequality, and being aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the researcher's standpoint.

Value – The value of these strategies of multidimensional feminist research is to develop new sources of knowledge and new approaches for effective transnational feminist political activism.

Anna Amelina is a senior researcher at the Faculty of Sociology in Bielefeld, Germany. Her research addresses subjects such as social inequality and migration, transnationalization of gender regimes, and methodology of transnational studies. Empirically, she focuses on formation of social inequalities in the context of transnational migration between Germany and Ukraine. Her last publications include “Searching for an appropriate research strategy on transnational migration: The logic of multi-sited research and the advantage of the cultural interferences approach” in Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(1), 2009, with Thomas Faist, “Turkish migrant associations in Germany. Between integration pressure and transnational linkages” in Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales (REMI), Vol. 24, 2.

When I began to think about this chapter, and to consider the impact of negotiating boundaries in my recent PhD research, there were a number of pertinent issues which could be understood in terms of ‘boundaries’. This chapter therefore considers the negotiation of multiple boundaries, in both the research process and the outcomes of development research. Using the case study example of research with a group of grassroots women health promoters, I explore the ways that adopting a qualitative feminist methodological approach served to unsettle boundaries within development research and development practice. As a feminist researcher, one of my key preoccupations has been negotiating and making visible issues of power and positionality in the research process, conceptualised here in terms of a series of boundaries. As this is something with which feminist researchers have struggled for over 20 years (see, e.g., Oakley, 1981; Acker, Barry, & Esseveld, 1983), I do not claim to offer any solutions to these issues, but rather this chapter will provide a discussion of how these dynamics and dilemmas were played out in the context of my own fieldwork. England (1994) highlights the importance of reflecting on the position of the researcher, and her role in the research process, as an integral part of producing qualitative research, and Rose (1997) suggests that this reflexivity should lookboth ‘inward’ to the identity of the researcher, and ‘outward’ in her relation to her research and what is described as ‘the wider world’. (Rose, 1997, p. 309)

Cay Anderson-Hanley, Ph.D., is assistant professor of psychology at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She obtained her doctorate from the University at Albany, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in geriatric neuropsychology at UCLA. Her scientific work has focused on the neuropsychological effects of aging, cancer, and exercise interventions. She teaches clinically oriented courses, including psychological assessment. Cay has served as a co-PI on the NSF Advance grant awarded to Skidmore and Union Colleges since 2008, and contributed to the development and analysis of the climate survey utilized in the chapter in this volume. She has interest in understanding and finding solutions for the challenges of achieving professional-personal life balance for all faculty members, especially as it pertains to facilitating women's advancement in the sciences.

This chapter reviews developments in the intellectual and activist work of African feminists and gender scholars over the past two decades. African feminists and gender scholar activists have broken with dominant epistemologies to frame their own sites of knowledge production and feminist identity, reflecting shifting conditions in local and global contexts. The knowledge they generate is rooted in a tradition of scholarship, activism, and engagements with state institutions and with transnational and regional feminist movements. I discuss (1) contexts in which African feminist standpoints have emerged over the past 20 years, (2) developments in women and gender studies programs, and (3) ways in which African feminist scholars in the continent and diaspora have stimulated intellectual engagement and activism through feminist research and publishing, collaborative scholarship, influencing policy, and new forms of activism.

The authors bring diverse feminist perspectives to bear on social entrepreneurship research and practice to challenge existing assumptions and approaches while providing new directions for research at the intersections of gender, social and commercial entrepreneurship.

The authors apply liberal feminist, socialist feminist and transnational/post-colonial feminist perspectives to critically examine issues of gender in the field of social entrepreneurship.

By way of three distinct feminist lenses, the analyses suggest that the social entrepreneurship field does not recognize gender as an organizing principle in society. Further to this, a focus on women within this field replicates problematic gendered assumptions underlying the field of women’s entrepreneurship research.

The arguments and suggestions provide a critical gender perspective to inform the strategies and programmes adopted by practitioners and the types of research questions entrepreneurship scholars ask.

The authors redirect the conversation away from limited status quo approaches towards the explicit and implicit aim of social entrepreneurship and women’s entrepreneurship: that is, economic and social equality for women across the globe.

The authors explicitly adopt a cultural, institutional and transnational analysis to interrogate the intersection of gender and social entrepreneurship.

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Authors’ note: To capture the collaborative feminist process in writing this article, we list authors’ name alphabetically rather than the traditional presentation of lead author first.

We use Third World, Materialist, and Poststructuralist feminist perspectives with an intersectional transnational lens to analyze our self-reflections about feminist pedagogy and the messy business of conducting our research. We draw on student participant interviews and responses to follow-up questions to support key arguments.

Much feminist pedagogy discourse constructs consciousness-raising and empowerment as positive. However, our research indicates our students’ experiences of these processes as well as our own as teachers and researchers is contradictory; outcomes are often unintended and not always positive, despite our best intentions.

Our work seeks to destabilize problematic notions of empowerment and consciousness-raising by contributing accounts of how feminist pedagogy impacts students in sometimes negative, unintended ways. These contributions should be utilized to better understand power relations between students and teachers, as well as refine pedagogical approaches to best address and reevaluate their impacts on students.

Rather than perpetuate decontextualized and overly optimistic notions of feminist pedagogy, consciousness-raising, and empowerment that fail to capture the complexities and contradictions of women’s lives and the gendered relations in which they participate, this chapter stands as a call to feminists to problematize their key concepts and practices and lay them open to critique.