“How Will You Give Back?”: On Becoming a Compañera as a Feminist Methodology from the Cracks

Abstract

Issues of power, inequality, and representation in the production of knowledge have a long history in transnational feminist research. And yet the unequal relationship between ethnographers and participants continues to haunt feminist research. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with the cooperative Sulá Batsú in Costa Rica between 2015 and 2019, in this essay I argue that centering solidarity and working through discomfort creates relationships that can reinvent and endure the persistent imbalance of power between researcher and participant. I conceptualize a solidarity-based methodology that is uncomfortable, tossing between "us and them," the objective and the subjective, akin to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “nepantla,” a liminal space of both fragmentation and unification, of both anguish and healing: a methodology from the cracks. In this essay, I reflect upon my experiences as a Puerto Rican feminist researcher focusing on Sulá Batsú, specifically on my relationship with the coop’s general coordinator. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the coop, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual analysis of their research, briefs, blog posts, presentations, and promotional literature.

Feminicide and counterdata production: Activist efforts to monitor and challenge gender-related violence

“…As noted in the introduction , this article stems from a broader action-research and participatory design project that is concerned not only with collaborative knowledge production and technological development but also with actively caring for the already existing community of practice around feminicide by supporting their work and connecting activists to each other. Puig de la Bellacasa (see p. 97 in de la Bellacasa 67 ) has written that “to produce a caring account, critical cuts shouldn’t merely expose or produce conflict but should also foster caring relations.” This is what Shokooh Valle 69 conceptualizes as “solidarity as a method.”…”

Decolonizing Sociology Through Collaboration, Co‐Learning and Action: A Case for Participatory Action Research1

“…Feminist research becomes decolonial when it incorporates marginalized research subjects in each stage of the research project (Fields 2016), transitions from self‐reflexivity to collective and dialogical reflexivity (Yuval‐Davis 2012), and promote social action (Johnston and MacDougall 2021). For instance, Anzaldúan feminist scholars emphasize solidarity in achieving the social and political goals of marginalized communities, particularly between womyn across the Americas (Anzaldua 2015; Shakooh Valle 2021), while queer methodologies aim to achieve the political goals of queer communities (Freeman 2010). In other words, it is when the principles of PAR—participation, education, and action—are activated that feminist methodologies address the unequal relationships embedded within empirical research.…”

Race, Gender, and Violence

“…In 2009, Patricia Hill Collins, in her American Sociological Association Presidential address, offers a capacious definition of intersectionality that centrally included transnational feminist interventions in sociology (Collins 2010). Transnational feminist sociologists such as Rhacel Parreñas (2000, 2005, 2015, 2021) charted the path for scholarship that integrates transnational feminist and intersectional approaches, including the works of Banerjee, Khandelwal, and Sanyal (2022), Hwang (2017, 2018), Shahrokni (2020), and Shokooh Valle (2021).…”