Within, without: dialogical perspectives on feminism and Islam.

This paper offers an ontological and literary review of Muslim women’s religious practices across the Muslim ummah, in considering the development of an epistemology of faith and feminism within the Islamic schema. Global examples of faith-based practice are reviewed, where issues of dominant and minority cultures and values refer to how Muslim faith practices are enacted within the local context. The authors use a dyadic, auto-ethnographic methodology to explore their own personal, political and spiritual positioning as feminists from a Muslim, immigrant and secular British background. The significance of women’s spiritual and feminist dimensions in the context of faith, nationhood and embodiment of ideological positions are analysed. Additionally, religious, cultural and the geo-political implications of feminism and Islam are considered regarding identity, culture and tradition, and religious resurgence, together with forms of feminist resistance to religious doctrine. Finally, the search by women for spiritual authority and authenticity is discussed. Keywords: Islam, Muslim, feminist, faith, auto-ethnographi

From Comparison to Collaboration: Experiments with a New Scholarly and Political Form

Society and the workplace are two factors that are important for the individual's health status. It is important that the individuals has the right skills to take care of their health. For organizations, it is important to strive for the welfare of their employees. This has proven to have a positive impact on work performance, reduced absenteeism and reduced costs for rehabilitation. In 2007, the local authorities in Umeå implemented a wellness offering for all employees working in the municipality administration. They later saw a need to assist employees who needed help getting started with new exercise habits. This study aims to examine how the participants in the "Get Started Programme", succeeded in creating lasting exercise habits , 3-4 years after completing the program. Research questions are: How have the participants increased their knowledge practically and theoretically after the programme has finished? How have the participants succeeded in creating the content of the programme in their daily lives? How do the participants assess their health compared to before they participated in the programme? Are there any beneficial factors highlighted by the participants as during the program? The study was conducted on the basis of semi-structured interviews with eight voluntary participants who previously participated in the Get Started Programme. The results show that six of the eight participants succeeded to get started with the goals for behavioral change, and still maintain a sufficient physical activity level today. Participants who do not consider themselves to have succeeded in reaching the goals they set up in the beginning of the program, point out that they have the tools needed to go on and continue the behavioral change they strive for

Fields in Motion, Fields of Friction: Tales of Betrayal and Promise from Kangra District, India

Over a period of five decades, Kangra District, located in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, has been continually si(gh)ted within different development imaginaries that have evolved at particular configurations of scale and time and been given shape within a succession of international bilateral projects. These development flows into the region have in turn fostered a plethora of competing institutions and practices, contributing their own sometimes divergent flows within an inherently mobile and “developmentalizing” terrain. While this dynamic and multi-textured terrain offers rich opportunities for partnerships forged across disparate sites, there is, I argue, a need to revisit “collaboration” as a key feminist tool for facilitating social justice and change. Widely lauded for its empowering, equalizing and transformative potential by feminist scholars, collaboration is also viewed prescriptively in terms of “success” and “failure.” Consequently, “strategies and solutions” are sought to negotiate its minefields and to resolve, often futilely, the friction that repeatedly erupts within them. In this paper, I suggest a re-viewing of friction as a valuable methodological frame within feminist collaborative research and praxis. In place of the prevalent emphasis on containing and resolving friction generated at border crossings, I contend that feminist-oriented “location work” that engages with friction and follows its routes through the fluid and fertile space of a “developmentalizing terrain” can provide promising avenues and detours for empowerment and social justice. Drawing on Tsing’s (2005) discussion of the creative role of friction across global connections, I reflect on some of the ways in which it played out as a creative source of production, interruption and mutation within two of my collaborative ventures in Kangra. In doing so, I demonstrate how an attention to the sometimes unanticipated and diversionary routes that are generated by friction within collaborative efforts, and the vistas of “betrayal” and promise that they reveal, offer valuable insights for encounters at the interface of feminist praxis, anthropology and development practice

Intersectionality queer studies and hybridity: methodological frameworks for social research

This article seeks to draw links between intersectionality and queer studies as epistemological strands by examining their common methodological tasks and by tracing some similar difficulties of translating theory into research methods. Intersectionality is the systematic study of the ways in which differences such as race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity and other sociopolitical and cultural identities interrelate. Queer theory, when applied as a distinct methodological approach to the study of gender and sexuality, has sought to denaturalise categories of analysis and make normativity visible. By examining existing research projects framed as 'queer' alongside ones that use intersectionality, I consider the importance of positionality in research accounts. I revisit Judith Halberstam's (1998) 'Female Masculinity' and Gloria Anzaldua's (1987) 'Borderlands' and discuss the tension between the act of naming and the critical strategical adoption of categorical thinking. Finally, I suggest hybridity as one possible complementary methodological approach to those of intersectionality and queer studies. Hybridity can facilitate an understanding of shifting textual and material borders and can operate as a creative and political mode of destabilising not only complex social locations, but also research frameworks

Research Ethics and Fieldwork at New Consumption Communities

It is hard to deny that marketing practice has changed considerably during recent years. This is reflected in its increased focus on customisation, coproduction and interactive marketing, much of which has been enabled by new information technologies. While marketing has remained innovative there has also been much rhetoric and little reflexivity about what has been done (Szmigin, 2003). Although marketers may have been listening more to consumers (e.g. through qualitative research), efforts have almost always been directed at controlling consumers; ranges of products pre-determined by producers have been pushed through with little real involvement of consumers in the process, at a time in which we, consumers (are we not consumers as well as marketers?), are ever more aware of what is being done to us (Szmigin, 2003). In fact, many of these issues are also reflected in current consumer research practice. Consumer research has been of paramount importance to the development of marketing theory and practice, yet control over the research process remains entirely in the hands of marketers and academic marketing researchers alike. Consumers are seldom, if ever, involved in the research design and analysis processes, which raises issues that go beyond ethics and into an epistemological arena. These issues are particularly problematic when participant-observation is employed, as little is (and little could be) addressed by research guidelines and codes of ethics relevant to marketing research. Adopting an ethical standpoint of care and responsibility based on feminist theories (Edwards and Mauthner, 2002), I address some of the relevant ethical issues pertinent to participant-observation that arise from the lack of inclusion of the consumer in the research process (as well as the potential issues that may be involved in participatory and emancipatory research designs), the shortcomings of the available marketing research guidelines and codes of ethics as far as participant-observation is concerned, alongside the several issues that may arise during fieldwork. To illustrate the discussion a reflexive account of my own fieldwork at six distinct New Consumption Communities (Szmigin and Carrigan, 2003) is presented. Although some authors have put reflexivity as the means to achieve ethical fieldwork conduct and relationships (Guillemin and Gillam, 2004), such argument disregards the real-time and context-bound nature of ethical circumstances at the field, where the researcher must often respond to unexpected situations immediately. Reflexivity is a tool but cannot be used alone; it is not completely exempt from its own political, philosophical and epistemological stances and paradoxes, as well explored by Harley, Hardy and Alvesson (2004). This paper therefore does not aim to construct yet another set of guidelines for researchers that will engage or are already engaged in participantobservation; what goes on in the field can be unpredictable and fluid. Rather, the aim is to discuss the key issues that may be encountered while in the field through practical examples. This should prove valuable in alerting consumer researchers on the breadth and depth of ethical issues in the field, and on the all encompassing epistemological issues that we face, as researchers, on a daily basis. As put by Birch et al. (2002, p.3), the aim here “is to suggest ethical ways of thinking rather than to provide answers or rules to be adhered to”. In this study such ethical ways of thinking will be placed within the particular context of participant-observation

The researcher’s erotic subjectivities : epistemological and ethical challenges

Aquest article pretén aprofundir en la qüestió de la rellevància potencial i la importància d’incloure reflexions sobre el desig i la sexualitat de la persona que investiga en els resultats de la seva recerca. Analitzem críticament l’excepcionalització de les interaccions sexual(itzade) s en la recerca: quines són les raons per les quals el contacte sexual(itzat) entre la persona que investiga i les persones participants es considera no ètic o problemàtic, i quines són les conseqüències del fet d’evitar la intimitat —o l’(auto)censura en relació amb el debat— en el treball de camp? Aquest debat ens porta a defensar una aproximació ètica alternativa a la prescrita pels protocols ètics institucionals. L’aproximació ètica que plantegem es basa en la premissa que la producció de coneixement mai no es dona fora dels nostres cossos i que la relació de recerca no és fonamentalment diferent de cap altre tipus de relació. El que proposem és una ètica relacional de la recerca que creï espais per al debat obert i en diàleg amb altres persones sobre les conseqüències (potencials) de les nostres accions com a investigadors/es/éssers humans en unes relacions d’asimetria de poder canviants.This paper aims to deepen the conversation about the potential relevance and importance of including reflection on the desire and sexuality of the researcher in research outputs. We critically scrutinise the exceptionalisation of sexual(ised) interactions in research: why is sexual(ised) contact between researchers and participants considered unethical or problematic, and what are the consequences of the avoidance of—and/or the (self-)censorship with regard to discussin —intimacy in the field? This discussion leads us to argue for an alternative ethical approach than that prescribed by institutional ethical protocols. The ethical approach that we envision is based on the premise that knowledge production never occurs apart from our bodies and that a research relationship is not fundamentally different from any other human relationship. What we propose is a relational research ethics that creates space for discussing openly and in dialogue with others the (potential) consequences of our actions as researchers/human beings within relationships of shifting power asymmetry

Sex-gender-sexuality: how sex, gender and sexuality constellations are constituted in secondary schools

Abstract This paper explores the relationships between sex, gender, and sexuality through a series of close readings of data generated through an ethnography undertaken in a south London secondary school. The paper takes as its focus girls aged 15 to 16 and considers how particular sexed, gendered, and sexualised selves are constituted. Drawing on Foucault?s understanding of subjectivation and the subsequent work of Judith Butler, in particular her theorisation of the inseparability of gender and sexuality in the contemporary discursive frame, these analyses demonstrate how students? mundane and day-to-day practices – including bodily deportment, physical games, linguistic accounts, and uses of clothing, hairstyles and accessories – are implicated in the discursive constitution of student subjectivities. The paper argues for an understanding of sex-gender-sexuality joined together in discursive chains and intersecting with further identity categories. As such, the paper suggests that subjectivities might helpfully be thought in terms of constituting constellations that create both possibilities and constraints for „who? students can be