Janet Siltanen

Separately Together: Working Reflexively as a Team

Discussions of reflexivity tend to ignore issues of practice, and those addressing practice are likely to presume a sole researcher. In this paper, we respond to the need for attention to reflexive practice in qualitative research teams. Drawing on our experience of working ‘separately together’, we identify reflexivity as an embedded feature of team-based research. We discuss how reflexivity can be used as a collective interpretive resource in the construction of the research subject/object, and we highlight reflexive possibilities unique to team-based research. We include in the article a presentation of the orientations and research practices that supported our reflexive teamwork.

Urban Contestation in a Feminist Register

Abstract Approaches to urban contestation that challenge the dichotomy between institutionalization and opposition, and understand contestation as including engagement, are explored. The emphasis is on how recent forms of feminist analysis and critical scholarship open up a conceptual terrain for such thinking, and the discussion is grounded using further details of City for All Women Initiative/Initiative: une ville pour toutes les femmes (CAWI-IVTF), which is seen to be a concrete, successful case. Its tactics and strategies are noteworthy because of the manner in which ideas drawn from feminist and progressive organizing in other (including non-urban and non-Western) contexts have been incorporated. CAWI-IVTFs successes are most striking in relation to women who previously felt alienated from local politics. The organizations rationale, strategies, and tactics provide insights into how women active in this network create new spatialities, and how their interactions in space are producing new political subjects.

Intersectionality and quantitative methods: assessing regression from a feminist perspective

Abstract This article examines the use of quantitative methods to advance feminist-inspired understandings of intersectionality. We acknowledge a range of conflicting opinions about the suitability of current quantitative techniques. To contribute to this debate, we assess the conceptualizations of intersectionality embedded in the most common approach to quantitative analysis, multiple regression. We identify three features of intersectional analysis highlighted in the feminist literature: (1) attention to context; (2) a heuristic approach to identifying relevant dimensions of inequality; (3) and addressing the complex, multidimensional structuring of inequality. Using these criteria, we evaluate: (1) multiple regression including context as a higher-order interaction; (2) multiple regressions run within different contexts and compared; and (3) multilevel regression including context as a higher-order level of analysis. We demonstrate with research illustrations that the models do a progressively better job at satisfying the criteria. We conclude that the third model offers a conceptualization of intersectionality that is the most consistent with the feminist literature.

Committing Sociology: Methodological and Epistemological Reflections Introduction

IN APRIL 2013, FORMER CANADIAN Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded to questions about terrorism following the Boston marathon bombings and the arrest of two men accused of a planned terrorist attack on a VIA rail train. It was a rare moment when a Canadian political leader mentioned our discipline: “I think, though, this is not a time to commit sociology, if I can use an expression” (Fitzpatrick 2013). One year later, in August 2014, Harper invoked this “expression” again when he argued that an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women was not needed because it was not a “sociological phenomenon” but, rather, a series of individual crimes (Singh 2014). In both cases, sociologists were quick to respond to Harper’s comments on “committing sociology” with Op Ed pieces (e.g., Brym and Ramos 2013; Singh 2014; Strong-Boag and Creese 2013). The Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) played an active role in facilitating these discussions through their blog, and on Facebook and Twitter; they also produced and sold a highly popular “Commit Sociology” T-shirt. The CSA also decided to create a new “Committing Sociology” section in the Canadian Review of Sociology with the intention that this would be a place for more immediate commentary and the sharing of sociological insights about topical issues. This Committing Sociology themed section is based on a panel that we organized under the auspices of the CSA Research Advisory Committee.