Barbara Biglia

Embodying feminist research: learning from action research, political practices, diffractions and collective knowledge.

In the past three decades, feminists and critical theorists have discussed and argued the importance of deconstructing and problematising social science research methodology to question normalized hierarchies concerning the production of knowledge and the status of truth claims. Nevertheless, often, these ideas have remained theoretical propositions not embodied in research practices. In fact there is very little published discussion about the difficulties and limits of their practical application. In this paper, we introduce some interconnected reflections starting from two different but related experiences of embodying feminist activist research. Our aim is to emphasise the importance of attending to process, making mistakes and learning during fieldwork, as well as experimenting with personalized forms of analysis, such as the construction of narratives and the story-telling process.

AUTONOMOUS AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING BY DOING A ZOTERO LIBRARY ON FEMINIST RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES

In current higher education, working towards an education-learning model that places students in the centre, we need to facilitate their autonomous and collaborative learning, as well as their skills to develop research projects. However, higher education students find it difficult to integrate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools for the management of bibliographic information in their research projects when they work autonomously. In this regard, our project aims to facilitate their autonomous and collaborative learning through the construction, use and dissemination of an on-line Zotero library on feminist research methodologies. This project is interuniversity and interdisciplinary. It is being carried out with postgraduate students on gender and women studies, as well as students of sociology, both graduates and postgraduates. For this communication, on one hand, we briefly introduce the project and its specifics. On the other hand, we analyse the implementation of its first two phases firstly, the design of the project and its materials, and secondly the construction of the on-line library through selecting, managing and evaluating bibliography items. Our main results show that students experience several difficulties and a great diversity of starting points to effectively use ICT tools such as Zotero. However, they understood the usefulness of ICT tools like Zotero and showed great satisfaction in learning to select, organize and evaluate bibliographic references autonomously and in collaboration. In addition, they have developed their ability to think critically about the content of feminist research methodologies. In this regard, we conclude that, with the creation of specific tasks and guidelines to balance class levels, integrating ICT tools like Zotero in education can work to facilitate autonomous and collaborative learning and improve student’s skills in developing research projects.