Real Life Methods ran from October 2005 to January 2009. This website is archived and no longer maintained. For up to date information, please see www.manchester.ac.uk/realities
Vital Signs: Paper Session 1c
Tuesday 9 September, 3.45-5.15pm, Room G33
1c: Nature and the Social
‘Looking for vital signs of feminism: Researching eco/feminism’s changing nature’ – Dr Niamh Moore (University of Manchester)
The paper addresses the challenge of searching for vital signs of feminism at a time when many recent narratives claim that feminism has already passed on. Adkins (2004) has suggested that such accounts of feminism are enabled by certain feminisms’ attachment to a particular arrangement of the social; in this paper I also suggest that an attachment to a particular arrangement of the ‘natural’ and nature is implicated in accounts of the demise of feminism.
The emergence of ecofeminist activism through the 1980s and 1990s might have been produced as a sign of feminism’s vitality but the assumption of the fixity of nature meant that the ‘real lives’ of ecofeminist activists were commonly understood as naïve and essentialist and subsequently disavowed.
hrough an account of researching a peace camp which emerged in the 1990s to protest against logging, I contest such reductive claims about the ‘nature’ of eco/feminism. Through unfixing attachments to particular arrangements of women and nature, I understand this peace camp not as a quaint throw-back to the ‘out-dated’ activism of the 1970s and 1980s, but rather as a site through which we might understand the changing, and ongoing, ‘nature’ of women and feminism.
‘Real lives in real fields: the significance of ‘being there’ for knowing ‘real life’’ – Dr Natasha Mauthner (University of Aberdeen), Dr Andrea Doucet (Carleton University, Canada)
The aim of our paper is to explore the significance of ‘being there’ in ‘the field’ for understanding ‘real lives’. Through a critical examination of recent trends within qualitative social science we argue that qualitative social scientists are spending increasingly less time in ‘the field’, not only ‘collecting data’ but more broadly coming to ‘know’ (see Law 2000) and understand the phenomenon under investigation. Methods and practices that are attracting increasing attention and usage amongst qualitative social scientists tend to prioritise discursive and textual approaches and materials (Mauthner and Doucet 2006, 2008). Drawing on insights from sociology, anthropology, geography and the biological sciences we argue that in practice, our understanding of the world draws on a much broader “ecology of knowing” (Altheide and Johnson 1994) including situated, embodied, sensual, emotional and textured sources of knowledge and ways of knowing (Bondi 2005; Bourdieu et al 1999; Ingold 2000; Law 2004; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Wacquant 2005). Whilst recognising the broader institutional, financial, political, cultural and technological conditions and constraints under which research is being carried out, we nevertheless suggest that social science methods and practices should better reflect the non-textual ‘realities of knowing’ by prioritising them; and if not by engaging in a reflexive social science that recognises that our ability to grasp ‘real lives’ may be affected and compromised by not doing so.
‘Thinking beyond the social: Researching resemblances’ – Katherine Davies (Real Life Methods , University of Manchester)
Whether or not we resemble others in our family, be they physical resemblances, or likenesses in mannerisms, disposition, temperament, emotions, health, aptitudes, abilities etc. can be an important aspect of kinship relationships. The way that people make sense of, or live with, resemblances does not always follow scientific, or social-scientific, ‘rules’. Resemblances can sometimes seem to be part of nature, genetics or biology, sometimes they seem to come about through ‘nurture’ or cultural interactions and sometimes their manifestation can feel more ethereal. Studying resemblances is a way of incorporating these elements into our understandings of kinship and this paper will draw on methods used in a sociological multi- method study of family resemblances in everyday lives to explore ways of researching these aspects of kinship that can seem somewhat outside the realm of social science research.
Download presentation slides [new window]
