Women's health research strives to make change. It seeks to produce knowledge that promotes action on the variety of factors that affect women's lives and their health. As part of this general movement, important strides have been made to raise awareness of the health effects of sex and gender. The resultant base of knowledge has been used to inform health research, policy, and practice. Increasingly, however, the need to pay better attention to the inequities among women that are caused by racism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, and able-bodism, is confronting feminist health researchers and activists. Researchers are seeking new conceptual frameworks that can transform the design of research to produce knowledge that captures how systems of discrimination or subordination overlap and "articulate" with one another. An emerging paradigm for women's health research is intersectionality. Intersectionality places an explicit focus on differences among groups and seeks to illuminate various interacting social factors that affect human lives, including social locations, health status, and quality of life. This paper will draw on recently emerging intersectionality research in the Canadian women's health context in order to explore the promises and practical challenges of the processes involved in applying an intersectionality paradigm. We begin with a brief overview of why the need for an intersectionality approach has emerged within the context of women's health research and introduce current thinking about how intersectionality can inform and transform health research more broadly. We then highlight novel Canadian research that is grappling with the challenges in addressing issues of difference and diversity. In the analysis of these examples, we focus on a largely uninvestigated aspect of intersectionality research - the challenges involved in the process of initiating and developing such projects and, in particular, the meaning and significance of social locations for researchers and participants who utilize an intersectionality approach. The examples highlighted in the paper represent important shifts in the health field, demonstrating the potential of intersectionality for examining the social context of women's lives, as well as developing methods which elucidate power, create new knowledge, and have the potential to inform appropriate action to bring about positive social change.

Although feminist researchers have increasingly called for participatory and action-oriented research, there have been few analyses of the diverse actions that can occur. We theorized the actions considered and implemented in a feminist participatory action research project (FPAR). For three years we collaborated intensively with a group of diverse women on low income who were involved in a FPAR project designed to reduce social isolation and other self-identified health problems. Our data set included tape recordings of 32 one-on-one interviews, 15 research meetings, and extensive fieldnotes. Our findings indicated that actions occurred on both individual and collective levels; some had been enacted prior to the project and were shared to promote ongoing or new actions, while others arose as a consequence of the women’s involvement in the project. Additionally, some actions were implemented and actualized while others, though discussed at length, remained hopes for the future. While the research participants reported the benefits of being involved in such projects, they also spoke of the potential risks. Our findings revealed the complexities of taking action in FPAR and highlight important considerations for others wishing to engage in this type of research.

Although there has been a rise in calls for participatory forms of research, there is little literature on the challenges of involving research participants in all phases of the research process. Actively involving research participants requires new strategies, new researcher and research-participant roles, and consideration of a number of ethical dilemmas. We analyzed the strategies employed and challenges encountered based on our experiences conducting feminist participatory action research with a marginalized population and a variety of community partners over 3 years. Five phases of the research process were considered including developing the research questions, building trust, collecting data, analyzing data, and communicating the results for action. Our goals were to demonstrate the relevance of a participatory approach to sport management research, while at the same time acknowledging some of the realities of engaging in this type of research.

Feminist action research is a promising, though under-developed, research approach for advancing women"s health and social justice agendas. In this article the foundations, principles, dimensions, promises, and challenges of engaging in feminist action research are explored.

In this paper we examined discourses of mothers who use substances. Focus groups were conducted at two different treatment programmes with diverse women who identified as mothers challenged by substance use. Real scenarios were presented to the participants and feedback was sought about how the women within the scenarios managed their situations and the actions taken by legal, media, and health authorities. Through the use of three lenses - rights, risks, and evidence - we identified four major discourses in the participants' talk. The `good mother', `bad mother', `thwarted mother' and `addicted mother' discourses revealed the multiple and at times contradictory ways the women made sense of their lives. Within all of the discourses the mother-child bond and the importance of providing necessary supports to mothers with substance-use problems were central. The women's discourses highlighted the challenges of negotiating the prevailing attitudes, practices and stigmas of being a substance-using mother while trying to do the right thing for their children.