Feminist Methodologies

Question 1

Life history methodology (Nwando Achebe)

Answer 1

The life history medium provides a direct narrative enactment of the ways, motives, and beliefs of a person within a culture. The life historian speaks in ways that she may not during other processes of research gathering. She expresses not only her political, religious and/or other sensibilities, but also expresses her totality as a person

Question 2

Relative insider/outsider

Answer 2

“My positionality as a southern Igbo woman conducting research on a group of northern Igbo people makes me neither a complete insider nor outsider. I am a relative insider because I was born in my research area and grew up there. I am also an insider because the Nsukka people have received my father [Chinua Achebe] as their “son and elder statesman” and have extended this welcome to me. […] I am however, a relative outsider because a degree of hostility exists between southern and norther Igbos”

• Achebe
• Perry also discusses insider/outsider

Question 3

What are some of the key principles of feminist research that emerge from Achebe’s work?

Answer 3

• Research with and for women 
• Collaborative 
• Innovative approaches (songs, proverbs, cloth history)
• Relinquishing power/control 
• Vulnerability 
• Mutual respect  
• Friendship?
- The ‘equality’ is short-lived and illusory because the researcher goes home when she is finished, reflecting the privileged ability to leave (Perry)

Question 4

Ethnology

Answer 4

• Writing culture
• Qualitative
• ‘Fly on the wall’
• grew out of colonization
• classify and rank cultures
• construct the ‘Other’ as primitive

Question 5

Mayuzumi on Decolonizing Epistemology

Answer 5

• Diverse ways of knowing
• Unlearn and deconstruct Eurocentric, male centered history
• Reclaim cultural, indigenous knowledges
• Healing - restoring harmony and balance
• Reconnecting to your roots
• Self-determination, self-definition

Question 6

The Dangers of speaking for

Answer 6

• Rescue fantasy
• Othering
• Orientalist and ethnocentric
• Failure to examine power dynamics in the research process
• False assumption of insider status
• Lack of reflexivity, responsibility and accountability