Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development

Gender and development has grown enormously as a field over the last thirty years. In this introduction, we interrogate the ambivalence that underpins feminist engagement with development and examine what current dilemmas may suggest about the relationship between feminist knowledge and development practice. In recent years, there has been growing frustration with the simplistic slogans that have come to characterize much gender and development talk, and with the gap between professed intention and actual practice in policies and programmes. Questions are now being asked about what has become of ‘gender’ in development. This collection brings together critical reflections on some ideas about gender that have become especially resonant in development narratives, particularly those that entail popularization and the deployment of iconic images of women. This introduction explores more closely the issues raised by such myth‐making, arguing that these myths stem from exigencies within the politics and practices of development bureaucracies, within the difficult politics of feminist engagement with development policy and practice and within feminist politics itself.     

Remixed methodologies in community-based film research

This paper explores how remixed methodologies can inform research in Indigenous communities using short films, combining archival and contemporary footage. Drawing on the lineages of Indigenous and feminist community-based research methodologies, we develop a three-part conception of remixed methodologies. We emphasize, first, the need to resituate the process of knowledge production within relationships between researchers and Indigenous community members. Second, we stress the importance of reconsidering the intended outputs of community-university collaboration to centre community goals. Third, we underscore how remixed methodologies can disrupt the narratives surrounding settler colonial archival resources, resituating historical footage with relation to contemporary Indigenous contexts. We apply this framework to our collaborative work with the Witsuwit'en Cultural and Language Authority and the Office of Aboriginal Education at British Columbia School District #54, combining archival and contemporary films to create Indigenous education resources. Specifically, we remixed footage of Witsuwit'en traditional activities from two 1927 National Museum of Canada films with contemporary interviews and footage of Witsuwit'en governance and land use activities. We highlight how making archival films relevant to contemporary Indigenous community goals required disrupting the conventions of scholarly authority, designing collaborative outputs to suit community aims, and resituating knowledge production within the context of Witsuwit'en resilience in the face of colonialism.     

CANDID DISCUSSIONS ABOUT FIELDWORK: The New Ethnographer pre-field training workshop

In this conference review, the author reviews the first The New Ethnographer (TNE) pre-fieldwork training workshop for doctoral students that took place over two days at the London School of Economics and Political Science in February 2020. TNE's approach to pre-fieldwork training runs counter to institutionalized approaches of risk management: it acknowledges fieldwork's inherent messiness and ethnographers’ emotional and embodied entanglements, while inviting participants to rethink the language of ‘risk’ and ‘danger’. TNE's contribution lies in facilitating frank and experimental conversations between early career researchers, first via its digital platform, and now through scenario-based learning in the classroom.     

Gender, professionalization, and the child in the Progressive Era: Patty Smith Hill, 1868-1946

This article discusses the career of Patty Smith Hill, a major figure in the American kindergarten movement, in the context of the Progressive Era in American history. Hill, an educator and child-welfare activist, became known both as a reformer of early-childhood education and as an advocate of the inclusion of the kindergarten, originally a private institution, in public-school systems. The article acknowledges this as one of the most significant achievements of the woman-led reform movements of the Progressive Era, but at the same time notes that it involved a substantial transfer of power from the women who had originally developed the kindergarten to the male principals and superintendants who now supervised kindergarten teachers, often without much understanding of their distinctive methods and aims. As a professor at Columbia Teachers College, Hill also exercised an international influence. Hill's career exemplifies broader patterns of women's professionalization during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.