How feminist knowledge is made in and beyond disciplines

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the relationship between disciplinarity and feminist knowledge-making in Australia’s humanities and social sciences. To identify the conditions of possibility for successful feminist knowledge projects, we interpret career trajectories of senior feminist and gender researchers within five disciplines: economics, history, philosophy, politics and sociology. Feminist knowledge-making about gender occurs in every field, but it has uneven impact and status in relation to different disciplinary practices. Career trajectories are analysed to understand how feminist research is practiced within, or perhaps against or beyond, conventional disciplinarity. Strategies for feminist knowledge-making vary across and within fields. Epistemic pluralism is a key possibility condition necessary for feminist knowledge-making. In fields characterized by conceptual openness (sociology, history), feminist knowledge-making can most easily be practiced as ‘core’ disciplinary work. In disciplines characterized by epistemic closure, feminists are carving out new subfields within (economics, politics) and beyond (philosophy) their mainstream disciplinarities.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• knowledge
• disciplinarity
• Australia
• universities

Acknowledgements

The authors thank their colleagues on this project, Fiona Jenkins, Claire Donovan, Marian Sawer, Monica Costa, and Karen Downing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Our discussions focussed on research mostly, which is a limitation of the findings given the link between research and education practices and the importance of creating new curricula for feminist knowledge projects.

2 We note that the vast majority of research and teaching academics are hired on 0-hour casual teaching or research assistant contracts and various forms of fixed-term contracts (see Ryan, Connell, and Burgess 2017, 3). Driven by structural reforms in the sector since the 1990s, the increasing contingency of employment in the academic workforce has now made an early career pathway to tenured employment the exception rather than the norm.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded by the Australian Research Council [grant number DP150104449].

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Pearse

Rebecca Pearse is a Lecturer in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University.

Helen Keane

Helen Keane is a Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University.