What is a Reflexive Feminist Methodology?
A reflexive feminist methodology is used to identify various ways women and men act to improve their communities that are severely damaged by climate change. It includes a combination of ethnographic, historical, and archival research. The methodology uses open-ended questions, audio recordings of the interviews, detailed transcripts, extensive fact checking with multiple sources, and integrating historical events to compose the final narratives. This incorporates experiences, emotions, and ideas to learn about sociocultural contexts.
The Five Questions We Ask (and Why)
How has climate change affected your community? When did you notice this and how did it continue? What do you think the future impacts will be?
Please describe your work. How did you become involved?
Before you became involved in this work, what was your educational background? Where did you grow up? Are you part of the community you serve?
Regarding mentors or supporters: Who helped you along the way and how? What challenges did you encounter?
Finally, how can those outside your community (even those in the Global North) support your work?
We asked the above five questions of each interviewee to gather rich information from the perspectives of environmental justice activists, including their motivations, personal backgrounds, education, and community involvement – as well as how global warming has impacted their communities. Why is this important?
In 1987, an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, Sandra Harding, explained:
Introducing this “subjective” element into the analysis in fact increases the objectivity of the research and decreases the “objectivism” which hides this kind of evidence from the public. This kind of relationship between the researcher and the object of research is usually discussed under the heading of the “reflexivity of social science.” I refer to it as a new subject matter of inquiry to emphasize the unusual strength of this form of the reflexivity recommendation.
Because women in disadvantaged communities often are “invisible” to the outside world, CKCollective employs a reflexive feminist methodology to validate women’s experiences and honor the dignity of those who are confronting significant climate change events.
Within this is storylistening — described in 2022 by Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig in the Journal of the British Academy:
Storylistening provides a framework for the theory and practice of gathering narrative evidence to inform decision-making, especially in relation to public reasoning, as part of a pluralistic evidence base.
There are significant advantages to conducting and documenting oral histories in this manner. We can pass them down to successive generations; use them as a baseline to track significant changes over time; increase the likelihood that the oral histories will be shared, so that others will benefit from each other’s experiences; to represent collective memories; and to let people feel valued and honored. We believe that it is vital to include personal reflections relating to the activists’ mentors and supporters, and how they overcame challenges on-the-ground to develop and expand their work. To understand how activists work, we must follow their trajectory and learn what motivates them.
