Collaboration as feminist strategy

Abstract

I discuss my collaboration with Susan Hanson, which spanned a decade, culminating in our book, Gender, Work and Space. I focus on the productivity of our research collaboration. It led us to combine quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and economic geography and feminist cultural theory, in ways that allowed us to find an audience amongst, not only feminist geographers but also non-feminist political economists and planners. Our collaboration involved a large number of research assistants as well, and though this kind of collaboration is typically hidden in most research accounts, these research assistants were active producers of survey data. I consider this, as well as how they helped us to localize and situate our knowledge claims. Finally, I highlight the support that comes from a feminist collaboration.

Comento mi colaboración con Susan Hanson, la cual duró una década, culminando en nuestro libro, Género, trabajo y espacio. Me centro en la productividad de nuestra colaboración en la investigación. Nos llevó a combinar metodologías cuantitativas y cualitativas y geografía económica y teoría cultural feminista, en formas que nos permitieron encontrar una audiencia no sólo entre geógrafos feministas sino también en economistas políticos y planificadores no feministas. Nuestra colaboración involucró también a una gran cantidad de asistentes de investigación, y, aunque este tipo de colaboración típicamente queda escondida en la mayoría de las narrativas de las investigaciones, estos asistentes fueron productores activos de datos de encuestas. Reflexiono sobre esto, y también sobre cómo ellos nos ayudaron a localizar y situar nuestras afirmaciones. Finalmente, resalto el apoyo que llega de una colaboración feminista.

Keywords:

• feminist collaboration
• situated knowledges
• quantitative and qualitative methodology

Keywords:

• Colaboración feminista
• conocimientos situados
• metodología cuantitativa y cualitativa

Acknowledgements

Thanks very much to Marianna Pavlovskaya for organizing the AAG event and this collection of short reflections, and of course to Susan, for her years of friendship.

Notes

1. Distressingly, research for this reflection led to the realization that this is my third most cited publication on Google Scholar!

2. And a good thing too. At one point we went back into the survey data to extract this qualitative data for women who had succeeded in male-dominated occupations, to see if there was enough depth to read the questionnaires as case studies rather than survey data. We found that these successful women were in fact men who had been wrongly coded (probably because we had coded women as 1 and men as 2 and those entering the data had unconsciously reversed the codes).