In
this blog I want to draw parallels in the ethnographic inquiry as a methodology
used in feminist research and that used for CCA research.
Women’s
Studies programs in the academes emerged from women’s movements outside of
academe. ‘Feminism’ itself was and is, first and foremost, activism, and then
an academic enterprise. Starting with the movements for voting rights for
women, and moving to ‘sisterhood’ and collectivity, and sexual rights over own
bodies, to the ‘third wave’ feminism that seems to emphasize women as
individuals rather than as a unified group, feminism and feminist scholarship
has moved hand-in-hand. Feminism as an academic enterprise began with questioning
the ‘objective’ inquiries often undertaken by male sociologists in the working
sites that employed men. Feminist scholarship took women scholars to the field
sites that were populated by women, such as domestic spaces. They foregrounded
the knowledges that women possessed, and attempted to give what was understood
as ‘mundane’ and the ‘everyday’, the ‘ordinary’, the status of valid knowledge.
CCA
also believes in the same principles in its inquiry. Its goal is to foreground
the voices that are excluded and erased from the dominant discourses. It aims
to give new insights into the phenomena it studies by listening to the
powerless. In the process, it hopes to not only contribute to academic
knowledge that often misses out on the deep insights of the marginalized
populations, but also enacts an oppositional politics within the academe by
doing so. It challenges some of the taken-for-granted ways of knowing within
the academe. It professes bodily involvement in the field; speaking to the
people on the margins, and being reflexive about the power relations at all
phases of research, not only at the level of analysis but also at the level of
entering the field as a researcher conducting inquiry into the lives of the
researched. Finally CCA is primarily an activist methodology that seeks to lay
bare the unjust relations of power.
From
this short reflection on the feminist and CCA methodologies of doing Social
Science research, I am prompted to draw a rather obvious parallel that both the
methodologies are rooted in Marxism. For both, the research inquiry is
emancipatory. In the present times, the enemies for both, CCA and feminism, are
the same – neoliberal, right-wing ideologies that impose and maintain
oppressive structures over the populations that each of the methodologies works
for. I would like to close this blogpost with one question then. Since CCA professes
ethnographic approach to research, how do we differentiate ethnographic inquiry
for a CCA project and ethnographic inquiry for a feminist project?