Synthesizing Feminist and Critical Realist Approaches to Housing Studies

Abstract

This paper seeks to make a contribution to debate on the epistemological base of housing studies. I argue that there are benefits from seeking an approach that combines key features of critical realist and standpoint feminist positions. Debate in housing studies’ cognate disciplines suggests that these theoretical stances are not inconsistent and I find principles for their being used in concert. The paper shows how those principles are taken forward in parts of the literature. I identify the extent of exposure of housing studies to critical realist and feminist meta-theoretical debate and suggest the analytical implications of a feminist realist approach.

KEY WORDS:

• Critical realism
• Ontology
• Epistemology
• Feminism
• Standpoint

Acknowledgement

This paper has benefited from discussion with my colleagues Sharon Wright and Isobel Anderson and comments from the journal’s anonymous referees.

Notes

1. See also the detailed discussion of how critical realism offers an alternative to relativism about knowledge claims by Ruth Groff (2004).

2. Amongst others, Alcoff (2000) sets these developments in a wider context.

3. I do not attempt to detail the development of standpoint feminism here, but base this judgement on the frequency of citation of these authors’ works.

4. Walby (2001a, 2001b) draws a similar conclusion.

5. Or, as Longino (1994) preferred, people who engaged an epistemological project with a feminist sensibility.

6. Largely played out in special issues of the journal, Feminist Economics, and an interpretation of the debate has also been made by Poutanen (2007).

7. Which means “… identifying differences (or surprising relations) between outcomes of two groups whose causal histories suggest that the outcomes in question ought to stand in some definite anticipated or plausible relationship (often one of rough equality or similarity) that is systematically at odds with what we observe”. (Lawson 1999, 38).

8. See also the review of the debate by van Staveren (2004) and Sayer’s response (Sayer 2004a).

9. That is, between relations that hold, irrespective of circumstance (or the conjunction of other relations) and those that may hold or not, depending on the circumstance.