Key messages Epistemology is a core concern of intersectionality scholarship. How does epistemology shape the operationalization of intersectional projects? Researchers’ positionality, embodiment of privileges, and ethical responsibilities all shape intersectional methodology. Introduction Since its introduction in the academic field in the late 1980s 1 by the legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw ( 1989 ; 1991 ), the concept of ‘intersectionality’ has not only made a staple contribution to feminist scholarship, but also become a field of study
-making and democracy ( Bird, 2014 : 170). Some social science research practice takes on this challenge. Research is not neutral but shaped by our theory of knowledge, guided by what we believe can be known and how; as such, it is a political act. What we choose to study and how reveals the relationship between epistemology and methodology. Heidegger states that ‘[e]very inquiry is a seeking … Every seeking gets guided beforehand by what is sought’ ( Heidegger, 1962 : 24). Heidegger argues that one cannot stand outside the pre-understandings of one’s experience. Like
. Instead, I delve into the necessary and painstakingly laborious social and epistemic efforts involved in making smart borders, efforts that are regularly carried out at conferences, meetings, roundtables and events like the one described in the vignette. Smart borders emerge here also as an epistemological project that shapes how bordering processes can be known, represented and discussed. I use the notion of epistemology by drawing on Jasanoff’s (2005) concept of “civic epistemologies” to describe how culturally specific ways of knowing science and technology play
113 SEVEN Methodologies, epistemologies, ontologies OLD TIMERS AND HARD TIMERS On the first day of my prison sentence I was joined in the reception cell of HMP Norwich by an older man, probably in his late forties, also starting his sentence. We exchanged a few cagey formalities: ‘How long are you doing?’ he asked, ‘Three months’ I said. ‘F*** me!’ he scoffed ‘I done more than that in a Panda car.’1 I believe he had and he faced a long haul on his latest sentence. He was the saddest, most broken man I met in the prison. The first days of a long sentence
significant factor in approaching survivors of torturous violence, defined as experiential epistemologies . This chapter moves to focus almost exclusively the latter of these three categories. It is here that I draw in the oral histories of women who have survived violence at various stages of their lives, all of whom, at the time of undertaking oral histories and ethnographic research (2016–2018) were seeking asylum or had recently obtained refugee status. 1 Women’s words in a chamber of echoes The first point of note is that the accounts outlined in this
132 14 Renewing epistemologies: service user knowledge Diana Rose Introduction This chapter will focus on mental health service users and survivors with attention not only to health systems but to housing, welfare benefits and poverty. In terms of disability more generally I shall also have something to say about deaf people particularly as regards education policy. The main object of the chapter is to contest privileged knowledge in social policy and associated practices by exposing its nature and to counterpose this with ‘knowledge from below’. I will
. Thus, in the following section I provide a brief outline of the contribution made by feminist scholars over the past 50 years, with specific focus on a feminist analysis of the criminal justice system, as well as of the state itself within which it operates. It will become apparent that this contribution rests firmly on an interpretive underpinning of feminist epistemology, because, as I shall demonstrate, only this particular theory of knowledge has the capacity to offer an adequate analysis of the continuing failure of legal reforms to reduce statistics such as
