Qualitative research in Women's and Gender Studies: the radical focus group as feminist praxis

Women's Studies emerged at the height of the so-called 'second-wave' of feminism in the West, and used elements of critical pedagogy and feminist consciousness-raising to magnify women's voices in the academy and beyond. Consciousness-raising (CR) was a key mobilising tool of the women's liberation movement, giving women a space to share their experiences under patriarchy and organise collectively to challenge it. By the 1980s onwards, however, CR groups declined. Some have argued that the women's and gender studies classroom retained many of the core elements of CR by encouraging personal reflections from students and educators. While feminist researchers have used the classroom as a space to collect data, research that combines the two approaches to inform qualitative data collection is scarce. In this chapter, I use CR and feminist pedagogy, to structure 'radical focus groups' during the data collection phase of my project. This involves a combination of 'sharing', 'listening', 'analysing' and 'abstracting' one's experiences, and unpacking existing feminist theories to generate new knowledge. Ultimately, the qualitative data collection approach proposed here can be used across structural feminist perspectives (e.g., radical, socialist, intersectional), generating data that is emancipatory in focus, and empowering for participants.