Doing Feminist Urban Research: Insights from the Genurb Project

Doing Feminist Urban Research introduces the reader to the newly emerging 21st-century global landscape of feminist urban research. It showcases decolonising practices, partnerships and teamwork, new standards such as EDI, geo-ethnographic methodologies, software-enhanced qualitative data analysis, and knowledge mobilisation.

This book delves into both the institutional and lived realities of the practice of feminist urban research for the 21st century via the insights of the GenUrb transnational research project. Through reflection exercises based on real-life examples, it covers feminist methodologies and research techniques, critically examining the ’field’ through comparison and feminist geo-ethnographies. It guides readers through navigating the politics of decolonising research, working across differences, and embracing feminist ethics and activism. The book also explores data through the practices of translation, data management, data analysis, and the use of NVivo. And it further introduces professional standards, including EDI, collaboration with partners, engagement in teamwork, the handling of crises, such as pandemics, and knowledge mobilisation, including utilising social media. Accompanying web resources will assist scholars and students with additional audio files and documents.

This book’s practical guidance will help those starting to contemplate and engage in qualitative feminist urban research as well as those teaching the practice and politics of research. It will appeal to practitioners in urban studies, geography, gender and women’s studies, sociology, anthropology, global studies, and development studies.

Linda Peake FRSC is a professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, Canada where she was also Director of the City Institute (2013-2023). She is PI on the SSHRC Partnership Grant, Urbanisation, gender and the global south: a transformative knowledge network (GenUrb), a Trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation, and an Associate Editor on the AAG International Encyclopedia of Geography. Her latest publications include the books Urbanisation in a Global Context. 2nd edition (edited with Alison Bain, 2022) and A Feminist Urban Theory for our Time: Rethinking Social Reproduction and the Urban (edited with Elsa Koleth, Gokboru Tanyildiz, Raj Narayanareddy, and darren patrick, 2021), and the forthcoming Elgar Handbook on Gender and Cities (edited with Grace Adeniyi Ogunyankin and Anindita Datta).

Nasya Razavi is a Postdoctoral Fellow with GenUrb (2019-2024) and is lead researcher on the Cochabamba City Research Team (CRT). She is currently the Latin America Program Manager at Inter Pares, a feminist social justice organization based in Ottawa. Nasya completed her PhD at the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, in 2019, which she has published with Routledge as Water Governance in Bolivia: Cochabamba since the Water War. Nasya adopts a feminist decolonial approach to her work in international development, gender, and environmental and social justice.

Araby Smyth is a Postdoctoral Fellow with GenUrb (2021-2024), researching place ecologies of finance and debt. She completed her PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research has been funded by the Antipode Foundation, National Science Foundation (USA), and Society of Woman Geographers. She has published in geography journals such as Antipode, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She is an editor on the Editorial Collective of the journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.