Promiscuous Feminist Methodologies in Education: Engaging Research Beyond Gender

The book marks the circulation of the term "promiscuous feminist methodology" and registers its salience for educational researchers who risk blundering feminist theories and methodologies in chaotic and unbridled ways. The sexism embedded in language is what makes the notion of promiscuous "feminists gone wild" tantalizing, though what the book puts forth is how the messy practice of inquiry transgresses any imposed boundaries or assumptions about what counts as research and feminism. What can researchers do when we realize that theories are not quite enough to respond to our material experiences with people, places, practices, and policies becoming data? As a collection, the book provides how various theories researchers put to work "get dirty" as they are contaminated and re-appropriated by other ways of thinking and doing through (con)texts of messy practices. In this way, gender cannot simply be gender and promiscuous feminist methodologies are always in-the-making and already ahead of what we think they are.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education.

Sara M. Childers, Ph. D., is an independent scholar currently residing in Dublin, Ohio, USA. She received her doctorate in Social and Cultural Foundations of Education from Ohio State University, USA. Her research utilizes qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, sociocultural policy analysis, and critical race, feminist, and post-structural theories. Her current project looks at how teachers in an underpriviledged elementary school in the south define what counts as "data" and how they use it to make instructional decisions in the classroom. In 2010 she completed an ethnographic case study of a high achieving, high poverty high school in the Midwest to understand both the successful policy negotiations by students, parents, and teachers, as well as how racial inequality effected these negotiations.

Jeong-eun Rhee is an associate professor in the College of Education, Information, and Technology at Long Island University, Post, NY, USA. Her scholarly interests include decolonizing research methodologies, postcolonial inquiry in education, and issues of subjectivity, identity, and knowledge. She is currently working on a project that examines changing meanings and operations of race and racism vis-à-vis neoliberalism, which she calls the neoliberal racial project.

Stephanie L. Daza is a fellow at the Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK. She is a research methodologist and critical ethnographer, interested in empirical and theoretical inquiry of boundaries – cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, local-global, and PK-20. With an emphasis on difference and in/equity in education and society, her research examines institutions, policies, and practices. Her in progress book on grant-science and STEM culture reflects six years of research on two National Science Foundation grants. Her new project explores digital affective technologies (DAT) as social science methodologies for a digital age of big data.