School of Social and Political Science

Description

GENDER.ED is hosting four sessions for any undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students interested in how they can integrate feminist research methods within their degrees and, especially, within their own research. The sessions will model how to think about and integrate feminist methods in dissertations and research projects across multiple disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Students can sign up to as many sessions as they wish to, space permitting. Each one-hour session introduces a method or methods and allows students to explore how the method(s) could shape their own research.  

Black feminist methodologies – Dr Olivia Wyatt (12-1pm, B1.05)  

The work of Black feminist activists and researchers has raised vital questions about intersections between oppression related to gender, race and class. These questions have profound implications across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. This session draws on Dr Olivia Wyatt's experience as both a public and academic historian of Black British history. 

This session may be of particular interest to students interested in Black feminism, in feminist methods for archival research and in oral history methodologies. 

 Photovoice as a collaborative research method – Priyambada Seal (1-2pm, B1.06) 

Learn to use photovoice as a feminist and collaborative research method. Photovoice is a participatory research method whereby community members, rather than external researchers, use photographs and narratives to document their lives, raise community issues, and reach policymakers.  This session builds on insights gathered from Priyambada Seal’s experience of using photovoice in collaboration with adolescent girls living in a climate stressed region of India. 

This session may be of particular interest to students interested in working with marginalised communities and in conducting participatory research.  

 Reading Women’s Agency Across Social Divides – Dr Lina Girdvainyte (2-3pm, B1.05) 

How can we uncover women’s voices and experiences in societies where sources were written almost entirely by men? This hands-on session invites you to explore how we can explore female agency and gendered inequalities.  Through a critical reading of primary texts from the ancient world, we will discuss how we can reconstruct social, economic, and legal constraints and possibilities that shaped women’s lives through such material, and consider how intersectional factors such as class and status mediated women’s agency and visibility.  

This session may be of particular interest to any students interested in working with archival and other material in which women’s voices are absent or sidelined. 

 AI and feminist research – Dr Raad Khair Allah (3-4pm, B1.06) 

When it comes to generative AI and large language models (LLMs), feminist research methods are still being worked out. On the one hand, AI tools replicate gender bias present in the materials on which they trained. On the other hand, AI tools are providing feminist researchers and activists with new approaches and lenses. In this session, Dr Raad Khair Allah explores the feminist stakes of AI, drawing on her own digital project exploring how Syrian and Palestinian women leverage AI tools, and how researchers can make use of such tools too to understand marginalised experiences.  

This session could be of particular interest to students interested in digital feminism as well as the gender politics of AI.    

How to sign up 

Click here to sign up for one or more of these sessions.

If you have any queries, please contact the workshop organiser, Zubin Mistry ( zubin.mistry@ed.ac.uk).