Feminist Forays in the City: Imbalance and Intervention in Urban Research Methods

In this paper I argue that imbalances and silences persist in urban research. There is insufficient attention to anti-racist and feminist theoretical and epistemological insights. Intersectional and materialist urban analyses that take difference seriously are under-represented, while patriarchy, privilege, and positivism still linger. As a partial and aspirational remedy, I propose a “Feminist Partial Political Economy of Place (FPEP)” approach to urban research. FPEP is characterized by (1) attention to gendered, raced, and intersectional power relations, including affinities and alliances; (2) reliance on partial, place-based, materialist research that attends to power in knowledge production; (3) emphasis on feminist concepts of relationality to examine connections among sites,scales, and subjects, and to emphasize ‘life’ and possibility; (4) the use of theoretical toolkits to observe, interpret and challenge material-discursive power relations. My own critique and research centers on North American cities, but FPEP approaches might help produce more robust, inclusive, and explanatory urban research in varied geographic contexts.