Doing Gender: Feminism, Feminists and Research Methods in Human Geography

Recently, there has been a marked growth of interest in research methods in geography. Stimulated in part by the epistemological questions raised by feminist and post-modem critiques of 'scientific' method, this interest took a severely practical turn when the Economic and Social Research Council required a taught component, including methods, to be part of all postgraduate training. This led to the development of courses on alternative methodological strategies in geography and, especially for human geographers, an interest in developing teaching about feminist methods. In this paper, I discuss some of the issues that may arise from the adoption of explicitly feminist approaches to geographical research. Recognition of the positionality of the researcher and her/his subjects and the relations of power between them, as Pile argued in a different context in his recent paper in this journal, raises important questions for geographers that we are just beginning to address.