Introduction
Collaborative feminist research that brings together different communities and positionalities is challenging. Those challenges become even greater in a global pandemic, as individuals are forced to focus on the crises unfolding in their individual lives and communities. Yet as the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic and political repercussions demonstrate, research that prioritizes the perspectives and needs of the communities that it studies is needed now more than ever in order to understand how to begin to build a better post-COVID-19 world.
The following is a conversation between three members of a feminist collaborative who were working on the research initiative “Women’s Funds Supporting, Sustaining, and Building Women’s Movements.” The initiative sought to understand how feminist funding organizations take on structural inequalities, and to do the research in a way that bridged the academic, funder, and activist communities through partnership. The research portion of the project was nearing completion when the COVID-19 crisis hit, and the collaboration itself faced some of the same challenges that it was seeking to study.
We hope that our candid discussion about how we worked to put a shared vision and set of values into feminist research practice, the ways in which COVID-19 challenged that work, and how we grappled (and continue to grapple) with those challenges will be useful and inspiring for other researchers and activists. For us, the process of writing this piece served as an opportunity to name and process the challenges that we face honestly, to notice and appreciate the community that we have, and to learn even more from each other. Yet in many ways, in COVID-19 we find that we are relying on our feminist research community rather than working to strengthen it. This is indeed the core tension of our work: each of us continues to depend on our feminist community for locating ourselves and our work, and for support through the crisis, but we have stopped actively working to strengthen and build this community through mutual learning, debate, reflection, and deep analysis. In short, we have put some of our feminist values on hold in the name of being feminist.
Our feminist research praxis meant that we all understood the urgency of the research, as well as the importance of not allowing that pressure to override our respective challenges and losses. But now, almost a year into the pandemic we can see that ultimately we have compromised our commitment to be accountable to the research in order to be flexible with, and accountable to, each other. In times of COVID-19, we need to work together to strike a balance between the urgency and the inability to act – a balance that we are still seeking.
Before launching into our discussion, it is important to provide a brief overview of our research, as well as our biographies, so that the reader may follow our conversation and understand our distinct perspectives and the complexity of our project, both of which were a consequence of the feminist research ethic of the initiative. The research is centered on four national women’s funds (Fundo Elas in Brazil, Women Fund Tanzania in the Republic of Tanzania, MONES in Mongolia, and Reconstruction Women’s Fund in Serbia), all of which are members of Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds. Women’s funds are public fundraising foundations that work to support grassroots women, girls, and trans* people around the world by providing them with financial and other resources to realize their vision of social justice.
Our biographies matter here because the research design valued diversity and part of what we are all balancing within the research collaboration is the consequences of our different roles and responsibilities outside of this research project. While we all identify and work as activists and researchers, we came to this project from different political contexts, jobs, and family situations, and the pressures of the COVID-19 crisis deepened those differences.
Augusta Hagen-Dillon is the Prospera Program Officer for Research, and coordinator of the research initiative. While she has no advanced degree, she used her knowledge and skills of the Prospera network to develop the initial collaborative structure and manage the initiative. When COVID-19 arrived, she had just come back from maternity leave. As a result, she had to find ways of working from home without the usual support from family or childcare. For Augusta, the research is a job responsibility that needs to be completed and on deadline, but it is also a means for her to address the crises unfolding in the world.
Rosana Heringer is a researcher and partner of Fundo Elas in this initiative. She is a Professor in the College of Education at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Early in 2020, she moved to the United States to work as a Visiting Scholar on a Fulbright Fellowship, but had to go back to Brazil because of the pandemic. Rosana needs to balance her multiple roles and responsibilities as a mother, daughter, professor, and board member of Elas. The latter position has required her to focus on supporting Elas’ work in the pandemic, as the fund has had to adapt its grantmaking and operations to the context of pandemic and lockdown.
Shamillah Wilson is a researcher and partner of Women Fund Tanzania in the initiative. She is an African feminist scholar, researcher, and activist, and works as a consultant in the areas of women’s rights, youth development, and movement building on the African continent and globally. When COVID-19 arrived, she had recently moved to a new city and needed to find community in the context of lockdown. For her, the research was a source of both income and community.
The following is a discussion on our feminist research practice, the impact of COVID-19, and how we are grappling with how to uphold our values in a global pandemic.
Conversation
We came to the research from different positionalities, but we were able to find alignment in our shared feminist politics and in the theory of the research that we worked to realize in practice. For example, we all agreed that this work is deeply political in that it should contribute to change and engage with and disrupt dominant discourse relating to resourcing of social and political change. We also agreed that it should be participatory – that we should work with women’s funds and their partners as participating subjects, be considerate of time and resources, and ultimately give back to their work. We wanted to avoid privileging certain voices, and to amplify those traditionally left out. We wanted to be transparent and acknowledge power dynamics, be responsive to how they played out, and be open about our intentions. We also agreed that it was critical to be self-reflective, given our different positions and relationships. For example, the contextual work and relationships that Rosana and Shamillah brought to the research formed the basis for surfacing and interrogating biases and assumptions about the different contexts and work of their partner funds, rather than denying them. In addition, the women’s funds in the study, while aligned in their political visions, are located on four different continents and operate in very different political contexts. Political discourse in Brazil and Serbia is currently dominated by right-wing populist leaders, while in Mongolia homage to human rights in part masks an ongoing political crisis due to widespread corruption. It was important to develop a research design that would consider these different contexts and surface the ways in which the funds strategize and act in response.
Of course, defining principles of feminist collaboration and practicing them are two different things. Although we connected to shared feminist values of attention to process, collaboration, inclusivity, and co-creation, throughout the research we continued to interrogate what these meant in our work with each other and with the women’s funds. For me, the most fundamental feminist principle that we put into practice was one of co-creation, as we truly worked collaboratively to develop the research questions and design our methodology and research tools, and continued to engage with and learn from each other as each researcher carried out the data collection and analysis with their partner women’s fund. This level of collaboration resulted in some difficult discussions, as most of us are not accustomed to true co-creation. In our first meeting, differences in expectations and experience meant that some voices were much more dominant than others, and it was difficult to progress in our discussions while ensuring shared participation. In subsequent meetings, we decided to work with a facilitator to help to surface related tensions in a constructive way. Though this meant that the process took longer, it ultimately resulted in a collaborative research design in which we were all invested.
Building on what Shamillah said, co-creation extended beyond us as the research team to the women’s funds as well. With the coordinator, each of the researchers took the lead in developing a different data collection tool. These were then tested by each researcher with their partner fund, and that feedback was shared with the team to refine the tools. From the research design to the analysis, we worked to share leadership and incorporate a diversity of perspectives. We believe that this brought more quality, legitimacy, and impact to the research.
But these efforts were still marked by ongoing challenges – I often found myself asking: is it possible to hold the identity of activist and researcher? The effort of producing credible research is one marked by the tension of balancing our activist and researcher identities. One way in which we tried to navigate this was to take time to share our work and point out to each other when our preconceptions about the funds and their contexts showed up. In the analysis phase, this meant sharing initial drafts with the funds and providing an opportunity for addition, comment, and challenge. Of course, on the part of the women’s funds, the narratives of their work are deeply personal, and the process of collaborative sense making can be embedded with layers of conflict if the parameters are not well defined. Initially, some of the funds were hesitant to confront or include findings that showed their struggles, such as the lack of funding and time to institutionalize learnings from all areas of their work. After discussing and reflecting together with the researchers, the funds understood that identifying areas where they were struggling, or were not doing exactly what they thought they were, was not inherently a bad thing, but was in fact a unique opportunity for learning. In other words, balancing the role of activist and researcher can cause tension, but ultimately (as illustrated through this research process) can offer women’s funds another, critical means through which to make sense of their work.
All of this was thrown off course when the pandemic arrived, and our different experiences and priorities threatened to undermine the community and work that we had built. COVID-19 transformed the dynamic of the cohort from a community moving forward on a path that we were building together, to a community focused on holding each other through a difficult moment, bound by our shared experience, values, and commitment to the research, but also trying to locate ourselves, our families, and our work in a new reality. We found that our different experiences with COVID-19 informed how we engaged with the research in the pandemic. With Germany in lockdown, clear guidelines from the government, and several years of experience of remote working, my situation was comparatively OK. Yet returning to work from maternity leave just as many of the traditional support mechanisms such as childcare and family were unavailable was challenging. I wanted to prove that I could still succeed in my work, and as the coordinator of the initiative I felt responsible for keeping us on track and deadline. This pressure was amplified as the initiative served as my main outlet for action with regard to the devastation witnessed globally as a result of the pandemic.
When the pandemic arrived in Brazil, suddenly we felt so vulnerable – first, in terms of health, and second, in political terms, as our president denied the pandemic and did not invest in the necessary resources and support to strengthen the public health system. My different professional and personal roles demanded much of me in light of the pandemic. As a professor, I needed to be there in new ways for my students and fellow faculty. As a board member, my priority temporarily shifted to support Elas to think of new ways of supporting their grantee organizations, including addressing basic needs and access to information about COVID-19, as well as new challenges, such as an increase in domestic violence and a sudden reduction of family income for most people. While the research was initially less central, it did help me to analyze the national political context in a changing and difficult moment. However, it is hard to fully capture the impact of the women’s funds’ work in this context. Our research tools, particularly the Context and Meshwork analyses, were helpful in understanding the changes taking place due to COVID-19, but they were themselves impacted by the pandemic. We have needed to continually adjust both analyses, taking into consideration the fact that the effects of the pandemic will last much longer than initially anticipated.
On the African continent, countries such as South Africa and Tanzania were responding with restrictions to contain COVID-19, which coincided with the analysis phase of our research. At the country and community level, as with previous pandemics, women and girls were at the center of leading responses. However, longstanding gender inequalities meant that as governments struggled to contain the potential public health crisis, women at the community level stepped in to manage the emerging humanitarian crisis and escalating rates of gender-based violence. Not surprisingly, this resulted in funds such as the Women Fund Tanzania being inundated with requests for support, building on their history of supporting smaller lesser-known initiatives that impact the lived realities of people. As a result, the fund had less time to engage with me as a researcher. Personally, as a consultant, COVID-19 meant that I needed to devise new ways of reaching and working with clients. It also made me question my future work and plans. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to start a Doctoral program in order to continue to engage with social justice issues on a theoretical level. Though I temporarily shifted my focus to these more immediate pressures, I remained dedicated to the research initiative as I wanted to help to make the reality that I was seeing more visible. I felt that publishing this research would bring attention to, and support learning from, the less visible efforts that keep societies going during times of great strain.
I agree that we felt even more urgency to publish our research – because we see both a risk of these stories and experiences being further marginalized and silenced, and an opportunity for them to offer an alternative path in a moment when different perspectives are sorely needed. Right now, there is a sense not only that the philanthropic community needs to better understand “what works,” but also that foundations and policymakers need to re-examine how they identify and support “what works.” I think that we have tried to do that with this initiative.
Yes, the initial research findings show the importance of national women’s funds to strengthening women’s movements in their countries. These funds all prioritize supporting groups and strategies that would not otherwise be able to access funding and seek to connect such groups to each other to support collective learning, strategizing, and action. Based in the same context as their partners, and given their engagement with international funders as well as grassroots groups, they are uniquely positioned to connect the different people, organizations, and allied movements that are key to upholding women’s rights in this difficult moment.
At the same time that we all felt this urgency, COVID-19 upended our understanding of how to be attentive to and practice feminist research – particularly how to be accountable to each other, our research partners, and our research objectives and process. When we missed our initial deadline to finalize the reports in August, we had an important group conversation that revealed the degree to which each of us was struggling with different challenges and losses as well as political turmoil. For me, this was a wake-up moment to step back from my desire to finish the research as soon as possible in the way in which we had planned and to recognize that our process had to shift in order to reflect the values to which we agreed. We decided to prioritize taking care of each other, to actively open the space for checking in and provide different kinds of support depending on our respective contexts and needs.
I think that this was the right decision in that moment. Crises like the pandemic jeopardize collaborative global projects like ours, as people are forced to focus on their individual circumstances and immediate needs and reevaluate their respective work futures. We tried to stay true to our commitment to support each other, and to give frequent feedback when needed, but COVID-19 impacted our capacity to concentrate on the work and reduced our available time as we dealt with our own challenges. We were all exhausted and distracted, and as a result, lost our ability to engage in deep, careful learning exchange and processing. In this sense, we needed to better understand what was happening in each other’s contexts and see how we could support.
Working as part of this research cohort has served as a means to contain some of the difficulties that I have been experiencing at a personal level during these unprecedented times. I have learned more than I imagined I would, not only about the research context that I was investigating, but also about the contexts and challenges that my colleagues face. Perhaps what we are learning during COVID-19 is that at an individual level each of us is affected differently and holding up differently in lockdown, facing different financial struggles, care burdens, and/or mental health challenges. At a personal level, I admit to not being that great at acknowledging my personal struggles, but COVID-19 has forced me to share them more and to ask for help when needed. At the collective level, communication has proven to be the glue that has helped us to hold one another through anxiety and uncertainty, but also to make sense of a world in deep change and how we center our feminist politics in this time. The importance of working in supportive, caring collaborative spaces for me during COVID-19 has become amplified; this is the kind of change that we need to build.
What I can see is that our research design and our intentions can only carry us so far. We are in unprecedented circumstances, so there are no guidelines for how we should respond. There are many layers that we need to navigate: our individual situations and different roles as mothers, daughters, and members of our communities; our collaboration and commitment as a research collaborative and with the women’s funds. How do we attend to these all at once? It is important to give each other space to share what is happening, and to alter plans accordingly. Yet simply learning about our respective circumstances and allowing flexibility with deadlines and initial plans threatens to undermine our work as well. We are working to find a balance between holding space for each other and continuing to move the research, and our collaboration, forward with intentionality. Even as we were writing this piece, we continued to live the challenges we were describing – indeed, two of the four researchers could not commit to taking part in the conversation due to COVID-19-related challenges.
Conclusion
Our individual experiences, locations, and political contexts informed how we approached the research – differences that were transformed by the pandemic and changed the dynamic of our cohort. It took several rounds of reflecting for the three of us who engaged in the discussion before we were fully honest about the difficulties that our work was facing. It is always easier to brush over obstacles in the name of focusing on the end objective, particularly in moments of crisis. Yet to do so would be to undermine the carefully constructed value system and practice that we worked to build. As our conversation reveals, there are no easy answers. However, it is important to lean into this uncertainty, to continue to engage in honest, critical reflection together in order to build a path forward. We hope our story will encourage others to pursue and share their experiences with collaborative feminist research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Augusta Hagen-Dillon
Augusta Hagen-Dillon is the Prospera Program Officer for Research, and coordinator of the research initiative.
Rosana Heringer
Rosana Heringer is a researcher and partner of Fundo Elas in this initiative. She is a Professor in the College of Education at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Shamillah Wilson
Shamillah Wilson is a researcher and partner of Women Fund Tanzania in the initiative. She is an African feminist scholar, researcher, and activist. She has more than 20 years’ experience in the areas of women’s rights, youth development, and movement building on the African continent and globally.