Bortom den rätta frågan. Metodologiska innebörder av att forska tillsammans

Abstract

In the academy, a clearly defined question is the sine qua non of a good study. Theoretical, rather than practitioner knowledge, is valued. Theories considered to be neutral often have a male bias. Knowing all this, how does one link theoretical and conceptual categories with real change for women and men working with local development/forests and formulate a reasearch question useful not only to scientists but also to community members? I began my research wanting to analyze the dynamics of local forest management with special attention to how gender relations were negotiated in a sparsely populated village in northwestern Sweden. It was important that the research was relevant to the people that I worked with. This approach presented two challenges that I discuss in this article: to let the conceptual categories emerge from the research process rather than from prior theories and to bridge the gap between researcher and ”research subjects”. The methodology built upon designing a joint inquiry to which we brought our different interests and perspectives. As a researcher, the inquiry provided me with a means to go beyond looking at women’s customary absence from local organizations and how they may be able to get a foothold within them, to understanding how the women themselves framed their needs and issues. The women used the space of the inquiry to create a women’s forum, something that emerged in a process of dialogue with one another. They identified and unsettled practices that produced unequal relations in everyday life. While the process made obvious the differences in our positions as researcher and community members, for the duration of the research, it provided a space where academic research was open for scrutiny by those whom it sought to write about and where everyday questions became a part of social theorising.