Transdisciplinary Feminist Research

Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice

Carol Taylor, Jasmine Ulmer, Christina Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429576331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science

What is feminist transdisciplinary research? Why is it important? How do we do it? Through 19 contributions from leading international feminist scholars, this book provides new insights into activating transdisciplinary feminist theories, methods and practices in original, creative and exciting ways – ways that make a difference both to what research is and does, and to what counts as knowledge. The contributors draw on their own original research and engage an impressive array of contemporary theorising – including new materialism, decolonialism, critical disability studies, historical analyses, Black, Indigenous and Latina Feminisms, queer feminisms, Womanist Methodologies, trans studies, arts-based research, philosophy, spirituality, science studies and sports studies – to trouble traditional conceptions of research, method and praxis. The authors show how working beyond disciplinary boundaries, and integrating insights from different disciplines to produce new knowledge, can prompt important new transdisciplinarity thinking and activism in relation to ongoing feminist concerns about knowledge, power and gender. In doing so, the book attends to the multiple lineages of feminist theory and practice and seeks to bring these historical differences and intersections into play with current changes, challenges and opportunities in feminism. The book's practically-grounded examples and wide-ranging theoretical orbit are likely to make it an invaluable resource for established scholars and emerging researchers in the social sciences, arts, humanities, education and beyond.

1 Introduction

Christina Hughes

There is a long history in feminist thought that has been concerned with the shortcomings of disciplinary knowledge. Disciplines cut and chunk human, more-than-human and other-than-human experiences into separate and hierarchised knowledge fields. That such ‘disciplining’ diminishes our understanding of knowledge as intra-relational, situated and contingent is at the heart of this book. Disciplinarity might create an external façade that the organisation of knowledge is coherent, and even absolute. But it precludes potentially more insightful, creative and intra-active ways of coming to know and, indeed, working towards resolving the many global problems that beset us. And yet many feminists who try to practice our research with transdisciplinarity and, in consequence, venture beyond our own disciplinary fields continue to experience how status, power and hierarchy work in terms of who is recognised as a knower and the status of the knowledge we produce.

We as editors of this book along with all of our chapter authors inhabit this landscape: one look at the chapter titles tells us something of the political and affective spaces of the work we do in pushing against the disciplinary powers that seek to constrain our thinking. In the conclusion, Jasmine’s metaphor of rust evokes the need to decay, corrupt and decompose disciplinary boundaries. Carol, in Chapter 2, speaks of (and invites) acts of feminist indiscipline. In Chapter 4, Ailsa is concerned with exploring productive uncertainty. Kathryn, Anita and Catherine, in Chapter 15, invoke transition states and Gabrielle and Emma, in Chapter 14, draw on speculative transdisciplinary research. Likewise, becoming (un)disciplined in thinking is core to Susan’s exploration in Chapter 18. These chapters offer deliberately provocative challenges which aim at undoing the languages of certainty – as if knowledge could ever be certain. Such undoings take forward long-standing feminist terms of engagement with academic politics; their situated knowledges mark an intent to consciously and systematically disrupt the normative as-is.

Yet there is a strange conundrum in the history of feminist politics and feminist thought which, at one and the same time as emphasising the importance of transdisciplinary knowledge production, has seen disciplines continue to exert their force. The sex–gender binary is one such area. A priori contesting the sex–gender binary should be seen as a political act designed to challenge ‘biology is destiny’ attitudes and practices. Stella’s foundational paper, reprinted as Chapter 18, explores this terrain as she provides a first attempt to construct a transdisciplinary concept of sex. She does this through a close focus on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and illustrates the intra-complexity of language, translation and meaning in producing conceptual understanding.

Stella’s chapter draws attention to another phenomenon that has created long-standing struggles in my own career and is echoed in many chapters in this volume. Transdisciplinarity is not the same as multi-disciplinary research where the emphasis is on bringing different individuals from different disciplines into relation with one another. It is true that such an approach creates a very interesting ecological field of knowledge. However, ecologies are riven with power and dominance and the question of whose knowledge wins out over whose remains.

We see the implications of this very forcefully in Chapter 10 which focuses on Caster Semenya, the athlete at the centre of controversies on sex testing. As Belinda, Louise Jane and Rebecca indicate, those that legislate for such practices attempt to ignore evidence from different epistemological perspectives. Through their account of cisgender normativity and how it has pitted trans and non-trans women against each other, Wayne and Jennifer, in Chapter 7, also highlight the importance of transcending disciplinary boundaries and logics.

Transdisciplinarity is not, either, the same as inter-disciplinary research where a researcher may draw on more than one discipline or knowledge field but in essence leaves that disciplinary knowledge intact. Transdisciplinarity requires a feminist researcher to be both traveller and novitiate as we have to consistently and repeatedly leave our disciplinary comfort zones and go into unfamiliar knowledge fields often without a map or wayfinder. It requires an inventive willingness, as Linda, Emily and Mindy note in Chapter 5, to break across the disciplinary borders we each might usually rely upon. In this vein, Fikile and Marleen, in Chapter 6, purposefully think with Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous feminist theorists and artists, and the potential of multiply situated feminisms alongside everyday early childhood pedagogies; in Chapter 11, Michelle and Cinthya draw on Womanism and Chicana/Latina feminism; and, in Chapter 16, Gloria uses the adjective mixed/mikst to summarise how her critical arts-based research consists of different qualities or elements.

For feminists committed to transdisciplinarity such thinking–doing across borders is, as Susan indicates, normal and natural. This is because, as Ada’s philosophical interrogation of Critical Disability Studies in Chapter 3 highlights, transdisciplinarity is not understood as a transcendent set of practices. It is a method/ology for bringing disciplinary forms together as emergent and contingent assemblages; and an opening towards a reflexive transgression of artificially imposed boundaries; and a means of disrupting the fortress model of disciplinarity through enmeshment of theory, positionality, politics and method (Anjana in Chapter 13); and, indeed, as an impossibly entangled antiracist polyphonic cacophony of beingknowinggdoing (Walter in Chapter 12). As Cara’s new materialist account of diffraction indicates in Chapter 8, transdisciplinarity produces new concepts to develop new feminist praxis that connects human and other-than-human domains of knowledge. It also encourages ways of writing our work that recognise reciprocity and reciprocal impact, as Jasmine’s conclusion indicates and as Veena’s poetic renditions (Chapter 9) so movingly enact.

Transdisciplinarity requires not just a rethinking of how knowledge is produced – which is something that feminism is well-versed in. As so much of the work in this book indicates, feminist transdisciplinarity also requires a fundamental shift in the political-ethical questions that are being asked at the heart of knowledge practices. Such new knowledge practices enable us to refuse the ‘powerful call’ of disciplinary knowledge. They also provoke us to remain alert so that we can resist the normative drag of disciplinary knowledges which repeatedly work to haul us back to the status quo.

The question at the heart of this book is how may we shape affirmative transdisciplinary feminist research praxis? This question is taken up inventively and with feminist passion by our contributors whose work demonstrates their deep commitments to creating new ways of being and doing, learning and teaching, researching and questioning. As they testify, this is not an always altogether comfortable space. But it is an exceedingly generative one as I am sure you will find.

2 Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering

A speculative musing on acts of feminist indiscipline

Carol A. Taylor

Introduction

This chapter offers a speculative feminist musing on the productive promise of walking as methodological, theoretical and activist feminist indiscipline. It combines an invitation to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) with a transmaterial account of walking (Springgay and Truman, 2017) to indicate how walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering attends to entangled, affective and political materialities which move beyond psychologistic, individually-bodied accounts. The chapter considers what comes to matter (Barad, 2007) when walking is apprehended as a feminist praxis of trans-mattering, and indicates how such an approach might work to contest patriarchal, colonialist, masculinist suppositions. The chapter begins with some definitional work on the conjunction – ‘trans(disciplinary)mattering’ – which positions walking as a mode of theory–methodology–praxis. This is followed by two instances focusing on walking and whiteness which puts the theory of walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering to work as a productive feminist indisciplinary practice.

Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering

In what follows, I pursue a line of post/transdisciplinary thinking with Sarah Ahmed, Karen Barad and Kathryn Yuseff, among others, and put walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering to work as a conceptual assemblage, a practical methodological conjunction and a hybrid theoretical politics of location.

I take up ‘transdisciplinary’ in Sandford’s (2015: 160–161) sense as theory and concepts which ‘are not necessarily identifiable with any specific disciplinary fields, either in their origin or their application’. Sandford considers both gender and feminism as transdisciplinary in this sense, along with a whole host of fields or studies, including critical race studies, education studies and cultural studies. The transdisciplinary mode I work (walk) towards does not mix or blend disciplines, as in some theoretical martini which accrues disciplinary insights. Rather, it aims to instantiate thinking and praxis as feminist indiscipline which orientates thought in speculative vein to a feminist politics which contests the disciplinary requirement for boundaries, cuts or exclusions in the first place. In making such an appeal, it speaks into the intimately entwined happening of racism, colonialism and disciplinary thinking.

Sandford (2015) suggests that a number of factors are needed for something to be considered as ‘transdisciplinary’. The first is that transdisciplinarity transforms conceptual thinking into a ‘historically based [and] materialist’ critique (171); the second is that a feminist transdisciplinarity is not a neutral philosophical critique but a politically-inflected act of theoretical and ‘practical criticism’ (171); and third, that methods which transgress disciplinary boundaries offer a productive means to both unsettle disciplines and to develop a space to think and work within transdisciplinary modes. The figuration of walking as trans(disciplinary) mattering is an attempt to work through these three aspects via two specific research examples.

Walking as a research methodology has gained increasing attention as a means to enact research methodologies which move away from dominant methodologies which privilege speech and human interaction. Pink (2009: 8) sees walking interviews as an alternative methodology for ‘understanding, knowing and [producing] knowledge’; Powell (2010: 553) emphasizes walking as multisensory work which ‘configures a sense of self in relation to historical, geographical, and localized environments’; and Springgay (2011: 645) calls attention to walking as a foray into ‘unrepeatable and fleeing situation[s]’. In addition, walking methodologies present opportunities for research which is emergent, spontaneous and impermanent because walking need not be ‘goal-directed in the sense of getting to a preconceived destination’ and can be undertaken ‘with physically and mentally flexible, free movements’ (Jung, 2013: 622). While Jung (2013) promotes the benefits of ‘mindful walking’, I prefer to move in the direction of walking as an embodied and embedded activity taken up in relation to particular locations, times and geographies.

Thus, I advocate walking as becoming in-tune-with; as slow walking so that one may sense the body’s openness and affective immersion in place-scapes; walking as knowing in-walking with mindbody rather than knowledge at a distance based on the cognitive logic of a Cartesian mind/body split. I have referred to this as a mode of ‘serendipitous walking’ (Taylor and Ulmer, 2019) which is transcorporeal in recognizing that humans and non-humans are enmeshed in material-discursive ways that tell ‘stories so far’ (Massey, 2005) – stories of power and privilege. Grounded in a processual, post-personal ontology (Massumi, 2014) and as a multi-logical feminist epistemology, serendipitous walking can, I suggest, be a productive endeavour in generating different ways of knowing – and mattering – that are more multiple, complex and discontinuous than the master narratives of White, Western, colonialist patriarchy have allowed.

In this, I agree with Springgay and Truman (2018: 14) who say that ‘walking is never neutral’, and who urge us to ‘cease celebrating the white male fla^neur, who strolls leisurely through the city, as the quintessence of what it means to walk’ like them, I wish to ‘queer walking [by] destabilizing humanism’s structuring of human and nonhuman, nature and culture’ (14). Thus, walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering is about walking a wavering line – a line that loops, knots, curls, furls and unfurls, a line that knits other lines into it – so as not to re-produce a straight white line. This is walking as errancy; walking governed by a desire to be undisciplined; walking as an orientation toward feminist indiscipline, walking as lack of discipline or control, unwillingness to obey rules; unruly, disorderly; disobedient, ungoverned. Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering, in refusing to do the work of boundary maintenance, opens a path to a sensing–feeling–knowing activity of speculative indiscipline. In this, it works as a materialist ethico-onto-epistemological endeavour and feminist socio-political praxis.

Walking, envisaged as speculative feminist musing praxis, takes up Haraway’s (2016) call to ‘stay with the trouble’. The trouble I am interested in is the ongoing work done by Whiteness and how particular activations of research methodology, feminist theory–praxis and human–nonhuman coalitions might help develop ‘modest possibilities of partial rec...