Telling my story: Being a feminist researcher in higher education

Abstract

Fielding questions and curiosity about your research prompts you to consider how it is being read and understood. As a reader of research my inquisitiveness is about what its relationship is with other research, why the research is designed in a particular way and how researchers arrive at their findings. In other words, one looks for conceptual coherence in the arguments that are raised during the process of doing research. This article represents a reflexive account of my engagement with empirical research as a feminist researcher. I present supporting epistemological arguments to challenge the hegemony of a ‘universal’ knowledge that continues to make knowledges that are produced through feminist methodologies, suspect; thus undermining the value of such knowledges. My stance is that knowledge that is produced through research is always situated and thus never universal. Furthermore, the situatedness of the knowledge of the participant as well as the located knowledge of the researcher contributes to the research product (Haraway 1991; Stanley and Wise, 1993).