Abstract
This article presents a practical response to the longstanding call for more inclusive research practices, particularly for marginalized populations, such as women in the Global South. It introduces and evaluates three qualitative methods for fully integrating female participants into field research, drawing on the first author’s experiences in West and East Africa. The article outlines the value of mobile ethnography, also known as “go-alongs,” video-based digital storytelling (DST), and participatory cartography, also referred to as “counter-mapping.” Separately or in combination, these methods can create more natural and dynamic interactions, leading to more reliable data. Better social science may empirically inform praxis-oriented policy solutions in development. Centering women’s voices may draw on their gender-based knowledge and empower them as engaged participants throughout the research process. Such methods may improve scientific outcomes in international studies and make research more inclusive in subaltern contexts globally.
Keywords
Introduction
As there is no “right” feminist, there is no “right” way to conduct feminist research. When we ask what feminist research entails, a classic answer is that it is research done by, for, and about women. Several definitions help narrow down this meaning. McHugh (2014) describes it in terms of its knowledge creation about women’s lives, advocacy for women, analysis of gender oppression, and transformation of society. Tickner (2005) highlights how feminists have employed various methods, including ethnography, statistical research, survey research, cross-cultural research, philosophical argumentation, discourse analysis, and case studies. However, for her, “what makes feminist research unique is a distinctive methodological perspective that fundamentally challenges the often unseen androcentric or masculine biases in the way that knowledge has traditionally been constructed in all the disciplines” (p. 2). Nielsen (1990) sees feminist research as a dialectical process “that involves listening to women to understand how the subjective meanings of their lived experiences may be at odds with the meanings they and others internalize from society” (p. 26). Similarly, DeVault (1996) argues that there is no single feminist methodology, just as there are many types of feminisms. What unites them, however, is a shared commitment to challenging the structures of knowledge production that have historically marginalized women’s experiences.
A key question might focus less on a definition of feminist research and more on how feminist methods can be more easily adopted across disciplines to help, to borrow a term from policy and development circles, “gender mainstream” empirical investigations. At its core, a feminist perspective on empiricism should have five aims: transforming existing knowledge paradigms, committing to knowledge construction as an emancipatory process, interrogating why we pose specific research questions, centering the positionality and reflexivity of the researcher, and aiming for research outputs that are useful in achieving gender equity goals. These are goals also shared by many scholars who do not explicitly self-identify as feminists, especially those examining social phenomena in the Global South. Keohane (1998) emphasizes that feminist research approaches are necessary for scientific inquiry because knowledge is socially constructed since the questions we ask and the methods we use reflect our preoccupations “as members of particular societies at particular times” (p. 196). Again, this view is relevant to all social scientists, particularly those working in postcolonial contexts.
At their core, feminist research methodologies aim to transform traditional research paradigms by emphasizing inclusivity, reflexivity, and the democratization of knowledge production. These approaches challenge the often androcentric biases embedded in social science research and offer an alternative epistemological stance that centers on the voices and lived experiences of marginalized groups, particularly women. However, while feminist methodologies have been lauded for their ability to empower participants and generate more contextually grounded data, they also come with significant methodological and ethical challenges. Participatory methods necessitate a profound engagement with reflexivity, as the researcher’s positionality inevitably influences interactions and interpretations (DeVault, 1996). In cross-cultural research, particularly in postcolonial contexts, there is a risk of reproducing power asymmetries if researchers impose their own interpretations or fail to adequately account for local knowledge systems (Keohane, 1998).
Nevertheless, scholars have documented that well-intentioned participatory methods can burden participants more. For example, while go-along ethnography enables researchers to observe participants in their natural environments, it also requires their time, energy, and emotional labor, raising ethical concerns about compensation and reciprocity (Nagar-Ron & Motzafi-Haller, 2011). Similarly, digital storytelling provides a powerful means of self-expression but can also expose participants to risks related to privacy, representation, and unintended audience reception (Gladstone & Stasiulis, 2019). Counter-mapping, while challenging dominant narratives, can reinforce existing power imbalances if not carefully implemented (Hodgson & Schroeder, 2002; Tilley, 2020).
The first author’s engagement with power-balancing methods emerged through work as a feminist scholar researching gender, governance, and environmental change in sub-Saharan Africa from 2012 to 2022. In each project discussed in this article, she served as the principal investigator or co-investigator, responsible for designing and implementing the field research methodologies. The methodological reflections here stem from direct engagement with research participants, enumerators, and co-researchers in postcolonial contexts. Across these studies, the goal was to document women’s experiences and ensure that research methods facilitated agency, inclusion, and empowerment. She sought to employ approaches that aligned with feminist epistemologies while also being accessible to participants with varied levels of formal education and literacy. These experiences raised critical questions about how feminist methodologies can be adapted to diverse cultural contexts and how qualitative methods can better account for power imbalances between researchers and participants under the appropriate conditions.
Thus, this article contributes to feminist research by highlighting how participatory research methodologies can be effectively integrated into studies on gender and development in subaltern contexts, while also acknowledging their benefits and pitfalls. It also speaks to scholars outside of gender studies who are interested in making their research more inclusive. The following sections outline three qualitative feminist methodologies—go-along ethnography, digital storytelling, and counter-mapping—that assess their benefits and challenges. They also provide applied examples from field research conducted in Nigeria, Malawi, and Rwanda.
Overview of Research Projects
The participatory and feminist methods discussed in this article were developed, tested, and refined across three multi-year qualitative research projects conducted in Nigeria, Rwanda, and Malawi between 2012 and 2022. 1 While each study addressed a distinct empirical focus—natural resource governance, conflict, climate resilience, and gendered legal consciousness—they all shared a commitment to integrating underrepresented women’s voices into the research process and adapting methods to local realities in the Global South.
The first project, “The New Mobilization from Below” (2011–2015), investigated the political and legal dynamics behind all-female protests against oil companies in southern Nigeria. The study explored how women’s resistance to environmental degradation and economic exclusion was shaped by traditional governance structures and their perceptions of law and justice. The research team conducted 39 in-depth interviews and 11 direct observations in three rural communities in Rivers State. Local chiefs, acting as gatekeepers, shaped both access and the form of women’s mobilizations. The project found that although women appeared to mobilize autonomously, their activism was often galvanized by elite male leaders seeking to preserve traditional power arrangements. Feminist ethnographic methods, such as go-along interviews, were essential for building rapport and capturing the lived experiences of women often excluded from formal politics. These ambulatory interviews allowed women to narrate their protests while walking through oil fields, markets, and communal areas, integrating physical space into their storytelling (Munir, 2020, 2021).
The second study, “Women, Conflict, and Modern Mining” (2019–2022), examined women’s roles in Rwanda’s artisanal and industrial mining sectors and how these roles intersect with environmental change and legal pluralism. Conducted in collaboration with local researchers and enumerators, this study employed mobile ethnography and participatory cartography to gain a deeper understanding of women’s daily movements and spatial negotiations in extraction zones. The research team embedded with female miners in coltan-producing areas and accompanied them on commutes through forested terrain and into mining tunnels. These go-along interviews allowed for deep contextual insight into how women navigated physical and social risks while working in an industry historically dominated by men. Counter-mapping exercises later enabled female miners to draw their own mental maps of danger zones, resource control areas, and safe communal spaces—visual data that complemented interviews and observations. The research highlighted how women’s knowledge of land, labor, and legality is often tacit and spatially embedded, requiring methods that go beyond sit-down interviews (Munir, 2022, 2023).
The third investigation, Climate Change and COVID-19 in East Africa (CCC19, 2020–2022), examined how rural communities in Rwanda and Malawi responded to the simultaneous impacts of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on women farmers, the study employed digital storytelling (DST) to allow participants to record their own narratives about resilience strategies (Glasgow Caledonian University, 2020; Center of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management [University of Rwanda], 2021, p. 6). Participants chose to either film themselves or be filmed by trained local enumerators, using prompts related to health, livelihoods, and environmental change (UK Research and Innovation, n.d.). These video-based narratives added depth to survey and interview data by visualizing the environmental and infrastructural contexts of women’s lives. The storytelling process also provided a form of technical empowerment, as participants acquired skills in using audiovisual equipment and became more actively engaged in shaping research outputs. As with the other two projects, the CCC19 initiative demonstrated that inclusive methods could produce richer data and foster participant agency.
Together, these studies span a decade of empirical research that prioritizes women’s lived experiences in regions shaped by extractive industries, legal marginalization, and environmental stress. By grounding the methodological discussion in these diverse contexts, this article aims to provide feminist scholars with practical tools for participatory research that is both rigorous and reflexive, as described in the three field methods explored in the following sections.
Applied Feminist Methodologies: Go-Along Ethnography
Description of Go-Along Observations and Interviews
Ambulatory or movement-based field techniques are within the repertoire of ethnographic methods, drawing on the transcendent and reflexive dynamics of lived experience in situ as the physical environment changes with motion. They often overlap with embodied ethnography, pioneered in Wacquant’s (2004) carnal sociology, which utilizes the actual body as a research tool through which experiences are lived, cataloged, and analyzed (Ribeiro, 2017, p. 142). Early examples of motion-based embodied ethnography can be seen in urban studies of U.S. cities, which utilize “walk-alongs” as a field technique (Lynch, 2003). During the rise of the phenomenological Mobility Paradigm, Kusenbach (2003) introduced the term “go-along ethnography” to describe how walking with her participants in Los Angeles helped her understand socio-environmental perceptions, spatial engagement, biographical-place connections, the social architecture of human relationships, and social realm interactions. She found that “by exposing the complex and subtle meanings of place in everyday experience and practices, the go-along method brings a greater phenomenological sensibility to ethnography” (p. 478).
This ethnographic technique may also take the form of walking, driving, or taking public transportation with research participants. It has the potential to better account for female research participants who must work more hours to close the gender wage gap and shoulder a disproportionately high amount of domestic work. Thus, they have less time and fewer financial resources to be stationary research participants. It can also reveal how gender dynamics impact women’s interactions and internal interpretations of those interactions as they navigate physical spaces. Movement-based research has not been galvanized to its potential for rural studies or those of developing countries, perhaps because of its roots in Global North sociologies (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, pp. 1–3). It is particularly relevant in Global South contexts where women may walk to collect water, firewood, and fodder or travel long distances for farming, caretaking responsibilities, or access to central markets. Mobility as a research tool is a meaningful but underutilized method for better including women in data collection and more thoroughly accounting for their lived realities globally.
Benefits of Go-Along Ethnography
“Go-alongs” are a hybrid research model that draws upon and complements the strengths of other qualitative methods for understanding social relations and place. They serve as an antidote to “drive-by research” that often misconstrues or superficially captures women’s unique experiences. The go-along method lends itself to interviews and observations in a way that helps researchers overcome the challenges of traditional sit-down data collection, particularly in cross-cultural settings. A large body of feminist literature has been attempting to account for and explain the particular mix of fragmented speech and multiple silences characteristic of interviews with subaltern participants (Nagar-Ron & Motzafi-Haller, 2011). Historically, most such interviews have been conducted in sedentary settings with a one-on-one dynamic that might be perceived as oppositional by the participant, particularly if the researcher and participant do not share the same cultural orientation, which could underlie such silences. Other issues with sit-downs are that participants may only discuss ideas they are immediately familiar with, be limited in context-sensitive reactions, and feel separated from recurring thoughts and routine practices in their natural environments (Carpiano, 2009). While go-along ethnography overcomes such hurdles, it is also positioned to strengthen field data collection in several ways that benefit female participants. It helps facilitate conversation as environmental changes stimulate the expression of ideas and build rapport between the researcher and respondent when the latter is empowered as an expert guide. A more horizontal power dynamic between the researcher and participants in contexts where women may not always lead conversations could benefit participants. It could embolden them to examine their rights in informed consent thoroughly, pursue access to research findings and outcomes later, and consider how the investigation can and should benefit them or their community.
In the first author’s investigations on women and extractive resources in Nigeria and Rwanda, go-along interviews and observations with women arose naturally. In the Niger Delta oil region, the research team moved alongside women cooking yams on lit gas flares spread across large fields and followed as they sold river snails to oil workers passing by in cars. Across Rwanda, the field enumerators crawled inside mining tunnels with female interviewees engaged in coltan extraction and commuted home with them through forest pathways. In both countries, production-based incomes made participants reticent to stop their work for research purposes; moreover, the rural geographies of extractive communities require long walks between locations, making the context ideal for walk-along methods. These motile interviews and other movement-based interactions with one demographic of women, such as formal company employees, allowed the first author to get her “foot in the door” with female respondents from other groups, such as those working at competing mining cooperatives. This mobility also allowed the research team to more quickly introduce our work to religious and business leaders governing the behavioral norms of the community outside extraction sites, thus gaining greater legitimacy through visibility to community gatekeepers and residents. Enumerators spoke with several new respondents while riding on buses and motorcycle taxis, allowing the research team to engage with a broader range of hidden networks in which women are more likely to be embedded through their social, political, and economic marginalization (Munir, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023).
In developing countries, researchers who accompany women during work or transit enable female participants to contribute to data collection in a way that does not compromise their income. For many low-income women not compensated for their research participation, an hour spent providing data may be an hour they would otherwise spend farming, gathering plants or fodder, selling goods, or earning money. Thus, motility eases the time burden that researchers place on women. Additionally, ambulatory data collection enabled the research teams to better accommodate the scheduling needs of female participants with caretaking responsibilities that required them to be in specific locations at certain times. In the rural African communities we studied, women peruse markets for fresh produce at regular morning intervals. Mothers may accompany their small children home from school on a community route each afternoon. Consideration of their timetables facilitated the gender mainstreaming of participant selection. Finally, we noted that outdoor objects and passersby during motile data collection helped facilitate conversation with female participants. A passing bus, an unusual tree, or a group of vendors prompted enhanced intersubjective openness between the researchers and participants, contributing to more accurate data collection. Go-along ethnography is highly compatible with and may enhance other qualitative field techniques, such as DST, outlined below.
Applied Feminist Methodologies: Digital Storytelling (DST)
Description of DST Through Video
DST is a collective digital media production form that allows non-professionals to create and share their stories in vignettes. As a research method, it is a technology-based qualitative approach that can reveal complex narratives from participants’ perspectives, often through videos, photos, music, electronic art, or other mediums. Due to late 20th-century technology advancements, digital cameras became more commonly available in the U.S. in the 1990s. DST soon became a codified process when arts-based health researchers gave participants digital cameras to photograph their everyday experiences. It aims to mobilize voices marginalized by dominant, institutionalized media and spread to multidisciplinary fields, encompassing multitudinous perspectives (Gladstone & Stasiulis, 2019). Since then, it has proven itself to be a helpful empirical tool for applied community development in Western countries (Marcuss, 2003; De Jager et al., 2017). However, it has been underutilized to mobilize marginalized voices in non-health sciences or the rural Global South. To help remedy this, the “Climate Change and COVID-19” (CCC19) project integrated video storytelling into our gender-specific data collection on climate change and the pandemic’s impacts in East Africa. The first author served as Gender Equality Officer for the investigation.
Digital Storytelling and participatory video are methodologies used in academic research to engage participants actively in creating and sharing their own stories. These methods are particularly valued for their capacity to empower participants, foster community engagement, and produce rich qualitative data. Couldry (2008) argues that DST challenges traditional media narratives by allowing individuals to tell their own stories, democratizing media production.
Arguing the importance of DST, Lambert’s “Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community” emphasizes the significance of personal narrative and the collaborative process in crafting powerful stories that can drive social change (2013). Critical literature emphasizes the ethical dimensions of using DST and participatory video. Researchers must carefully navigate issues of consent, representation, and potential harm. It is paramount to ensure that participants have control over their stories and that their narratives are represented authentically and respectfully.
For CCC19, rural community members in Rwanda and Malawi told stories of their experiences with climate change resiliency practices during the first two years of the pandemic. In both countries, participants, mostly farmers, were given a choice to operate a video recording device lent by the field team or to have a field enumerator record them speaking into the camera. They could choose to speak freely about their experiences or to select among five prompts that started with, “Tell me about…” Although participants were instructed to speak for about 5 minutes, no participant was cut off, and about half chose to speak for longer. All the participants spoke in their native language, Kinyarwanda or Chichewa, and their recordings were subtitled into English for wider global dissemination. Their video vignettes were used to analyze data and produce the project’s short documentary about our findings.
Benefits of DST Through Video
Digital participatory data collection offers numerous benefits for gender mainstreaming and amplifying women’s stories. First, the differences in women’s experiences with climate change and COVID-19 in Rwanda compared to Malawi were seen in our surveys and interviews, but powerfully contextualized only in their video vignettes. Too often, African women are “essentialized” as having similar positionalities by their shared continent, regardless of their particular orientation. However, comparing the stories women told on camera in the two countries, we could see details that may have been less obvious in our audio interviews, quantified survey responses, or observational notes. For example, in our video data, respondents could point out vital roads closed for COVID-19 management in Rwanda or marketplaces hosting pandemic outbreaks in Malawi, which illuminates our survey findings that Rwandan women felt less vulnerable to COVID-19 than their Malawian counterparts. Our participants could show the camera the conditions of their crops or how far a water source lay in the distance, which helped the team see how banana farmers in Rwanda fared compared to tobacco farmers in Malawi. The data in the videos aligned with our survey, interview, and observation findings, offering a more detailed context for our other qualitative and quantitative results.
Two additional benefits may be of particular importance to female research participants in developing countries. Our Rwandan and Malawian enumerators had not expected the DST methods to function so powerfully as a conduit for technical training for rural women, most of whom had limited experience with technology. In post-project assessments, some women reported feeling empowered by their experience with new equipment and appreciated learning more about video recording. Moreover, digital stories have an “afterlife” and one that can help disseminate findings about women’s experiences to a non-academic audience. Their imagery remains potent in digital form for years, perhaps even becoming more intriguing with age. It will likely be consumed by a general audience that otherwise would not access written scholarly findings. This potential to reach a larger audience undergirds Gladstone and Stasiulis’s (2019) assertion that video storytelling can connect the personal and the structural to galvanize social change for the benefit of women.
DST can uniquely draw attention to social justice outcomes, but its history is not unproblematic in the Global South. For decades, we have seen media images of political violence, starvations, and health crises in developing countries that have generated advertising revenue, garnered grants, and bolstered professional promotions for those behind the lenses and publications. Digital imagery of suffering has objectified participants or commodified their intimate interior images into what Kleinman and Kleinman (1996) term trauma stories. Along with Cohen (2013, Chapter 7), the two authors caution that digital images historically have essentialized, naturalized, or sentimentalized suffering. Like political and NGO actors, researchers must develop “valid appropriations” by historizing the topic at hand, critically self-reflecting on their purposes, and profoundly considering how those purposes will evolve within cultural processes. Their starting point should be the understanding that they have the potential to harm (Kleinman & Kleinman, 1996, p. 18). For this reason, participatory methods that train community members to use the technology and engage as equals with researchers are vital for subaltern contexts. Go-along methods and DST work together and may further enhance the technique described below, which involves map-making as a form of hand-documenting the spaces that researchers and participants navigate together.
Counter-Mapping
Description of Counter-mapping
Participatory field cartography, as a form of ethnographic data collection, was initially adapted from cultural anthropology and, more recently, from critical geography (Brickell, 2012; Kingsolver et al., 2017). It enables researchers and local collaborators to interact in a group setting, yielding visual data on space and human interactions (Caquard & Cartwright, 2014). An influential example of this method is Elisabeth Wood’s (2003), a book depicting participants’ interpretations of geographic locations during and after the Salvadoran Civil War. This form of (relatively) professional cartography has become even more advanced with GIS and GPS technology integration (Dalton & Stallmann, 2018). However, critics have pointed out that maps can render inequalities visible while simultaneously reinforcing them. They may perpetuate stereotypes about communities and other forms of ethnocentrism (Kingsolver et al., 2017, p. 310). Traditional mapping, as a data collection method, therefore, has its limits.
In response to these drawbacks, “counter-mapping” has emerged as a participatory strategy to democratize research practices by providing cartographic representations that offer alternatives to traditional depictions of spatial and geographic “realities.” With participants driving the map-making in the field, these counter-representations can help articulate marginalized or unseen narratives about events, relationships, and histories of locations. We can use counter-maps to visualize alternative narratives of colonialism, legal and political changes, and the natural environment (Sletto et al., 2020; Tilley, 2020; Wainwright & Bryan, 2009). They have the potential to overturn exploitative research models that fail to acknowledge gender-based, indigenous, and alternative knowledge or those that impede open communication and collaboration among the researcher and participants (Howitt & Stevens, 2016). This is particularly meaningful for women whose perspectives may not be at the forefront of non-feminist research, especially in postcolonial societies with intersecting power arrangements that privilege men’s voices.
Natural resource extraction can create spaces that are contested both geographically and socially, making them well-suited to cartographic analysis. In 2021, the first author led counter-mapping workshops among community women working near six mine sites in Rwanda (Munir, 2023). The research team produced five levels of mapping over three days at each site. Respondent groups first collaborated on a base map to identify, add, and correct locations on our initial community map, which was created from interview data. Base map-making was an opportunity to use maps to facilitate more effective recollections of experiences that initial interviews may not have captured. This first map was contextualized through an extended map identifying important outside sites on the mines’ peripheries. Then, the women reconciled their maps to produce a ground-checked map or a balanced, communally-agreed-upon map. In the fourth step, enumerators guided each participant in creating an individually narrated map, on which each woman drew her movement routes, workspaces, socializing points, and residences. Participants essentially used the collaborative map to narrate their personal experiences. Lastly, a community investment map (CIM) launched interactive discussions about minimizing violence in mining communities. Enumerators and participants actively drew on the map to show how hypothetical changes to space and geography could enhance women’s interests.
Benefits of Counter-mapping
Maps can facilitate discussions to access larger datasets or serve as datasets themselves. The first author’s gender and mining project focused on the former, but the following paragraph also outlines the outcomes when others have done the latter. There were three gains in using manual mapping as a discursive tool. First, the creative activity served as a forum for introducing the research team and facilitating interviews, focus group discussions, and walking observations. Participants may initially feel uncomfortable having direct conversations with an outside researcher with whom they are unfamiliar. Drawing maps allowed participants to use art as a distraction to avoid awkward eye contact and fill silent gaps in the conversation. Second, it served as an empowerment mechanism to elevate the voices of valuable women in an environment where participants are not typically asked for their views on extractive politics. They could demonstrate their particularized local expertise in a way that did not depend on the level of formal literacy or ability to verbalize their views confidently. It was also a decolonizing strategy because it was nonverbal data that did not require participants to explain mining terms using borrowed English vocabulary or have their words translated from their indigenous language.
A verbal or textual “story unit” can also become a point on a map created by the researcher. Textual narratives can be transformed into geographic data by identifying “narrative segments,” which are spatiotemporally discrete interview sections with corresponding codes (Caquard et al., 2019). This can be a novel way to represent verbal and textual data visually. Other research projects have used counter-maps as a coded dataset, with locations on maps categorized or multiple maps superimposed to reveal the most salient themes in participants’ conceptualizations of space. These codes can be analyzed qualitatively or quantitatively to elicit fascinating results. For example, an investigation of Bolivian land titling revealed how gender constructs limit women’s movement far from home, in ways that align with indigenous cultural practices, despite women’s legal access to government-approved lands designated explicitly for their ethnic group (Anthias, 2019). This is an example of counter-maps revealing the social colander through which law and policy on the books are translated into everyday norms, often in contradiction with and informed by social norms. A study of displaced families in Sri Lanka found that the physical structure of the refugee housing layouts exacerbated their negative experiences (Balasundaram, 2014). This finding demonstrates the power of counter-maps to reveal previously unseen third variables that impact vulnerable populations. In another example, a social design experiment demonstrated how American youth imagined new forms of mobility and activity for their future community navigation by mapping their experiences on bicycles (Taylor & Hall, 2013). This highlights the counter-mapping’s emancipatory potential for altering participants’ futures through the interactive cartographic process. However, challenges and opportunities are inherent to counter-mapping, walk-alongs, and digital storytelling, and the following section explores these in greater depth.
Challenges and Opportunities
The three examples of gender-integrative methods described above have the potential to center women’s experiences, elevate women’s voices, and produce more empirically reliable social science. However, as with all methods, they also have their shortcomings that researchers should be aware of. First, while participatory methods are often seen as empowering, scholars warn that they can still reproduce colonial or hierarchical dynamics if not critically examined (Cahill, 2007; Smith, 2012). Without intentional disruption of dominant power structures, inclusion can become performative. This makes it essential to interrogate who defines the research agenda, whose knowledge is prioritized, and how authority is shared.
Moreover, addressing ethical concerns requires ongoing reflexivity—researchers must examine their positionality, assumptions, and real-time decisions that can influence outcomes (Finlay, 2002; Pillow, 2003). Power imbalances can surface through language, framing, or process design. Transparent negotiation of roles and explicit participant consent are essential, especially when working with sensitive or traumatic narratives (McClelland, 2017). Even after participation, issues of ownership arise. Researchers often retain control over interpretation and dissemination, raising concerns about participant agency and narrative authority (Gubrium & Harper, 2013). Tokenism is another risk—when participation is superficial and used to satisfy institutional optics without redistributing actual power (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Cornwall, 2008). Ethical participatory research must extend beyond the principle of “do no harm” to actively protect and benefit participants (Fine, 2008; Tuck, 2009).
In the studies for this article, several steps were taken to meet these challenges. In Nigeria, research questions were co-designed with women leaders through consensus-building workshops. Hiring and training female research assistants from local communities in Rwanda mitigated outsider bias, while Malawian community-based assistants were trained to conduct interviews in local dialects, thereby increasing both trust and participant agency. Participants were invited to review transcripts and suggest changes before publication, and all were offered opt-out options at every phase. In all three countries, research teams hosted feedback loops where participants could review their own data at the end of collection with the help of interpreters; pre- and post-interview debriefs allowed participants to reflect on their own narratives and control what was recorded or omitted, and compensation for time was standardized and discussed in advance to ensure transparency. These approaches aimed to embed collaboration and respect into every phase of the research process, aligning methodological rigor with feminist ethics.
Moreover, walk-along ethnography requires participant mobility and a degree of robust health, which may not be feasible for older adults, those with physical disabilities, or in cultural contexts where women do not often walk alone. The first author conducted research in temperate and tropical areas and weather conditions that could inhibit motile approaches in other climates. Movement-based data collection may not yield equally accurate results in areas with higher crime rates, at times of day or on days of the week with low levels of public movement, or with substandard recording equipment that cannot effectively capture voices in noisy environments. Our CCC19 team had to adapt DST trainings to encompass long-term technical support for participants who had ongoing questions about recording equipment. We noted that some female participants felt more comfortable asking their male partners’ permission before speaking on camera, which suggests that research participation is not always a purely individual choice. Video storytelling should entail an ethical component of sharing the research outcomes with participants, as the Rwandan and Malawian women we worked with asked where the vignettes would be shown and how they could access them themselves (which was on the project website).
An unexpected challenge in counter-mapping arose in Rwanda—an inherent tension in how participants viewed their space and how they felt the government wanted them to view it. They felt confident showing where they engaged in informal, artisanal mining, but knew this was illegal. They could point out where they grew small crops, but at times, this was on land they did not own and for which they did not have permission to use. Then, data collection took place during the COVID-19 pandemic’s social distancing measures, so participants were sometimes in prohibited areas altogether (International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN], 2021). Thus, counter-mapping as an exercise exposes local and state politics at play and the broader political significance of spatial interactions. These conversations had to be carefully navigated. In line with this, Hodgson and Schroeder (2002) found that with political dilemmas typical of counter-mapping efforts in Tanzania, researchers should consider conservation conflicts in territorialization, privatization, integration, and indigenization; problems associated with the theory and practice of “community-level” political engagement; the need to combine mapping efforts with broader legal and political strategies; and critical questions involving the agency of “external” actors such as conservation and development donors, the state, and private business interests. This demonstrates that when researchers put participants at the center of research design, the latter’s politics come with them.
Nevertheless, the opportunities for deepening and expanding the power of gender-mainstreamed participatory research far exceed any potential hindrances. The expansion of new transportation systems in developing countries, from widened highways to lengthened railroads, from ride-share startups to electric motorcycles, enhances the options for researchers seeking to conduct mobile data collection with participants across a range of transit options. Forced migration is forging new pathways and recreating movement patterns that enable researchers to engage in innovative go-alongs like never before. DST is poised to become even more democratizing as research participants in the Global South have increasing access to the internet and ICT technologies through mobile phones, especially in rural areas. The cost of this digital access continues to decrease as business models adapt to accommodate lower-income consumers using mobile phones, allowing researchers to utilize DST with a broader range of participants, especially those previously marginalized (Furuholt & Matotay, 2011; Van Stam & van Greunen, 2014). Counter-mapping is perhaps the most revealing among the three, as computer-based cartography is now easily integrated with manual map-making in the field. Participants who have never drawn a map before are now positioned to have researchers translate their creations into an electronic format and analyze them using a range of programs, including ArcGIS, eSpatial, Maptitude, and QGIS. Changing movement patterns and technology render inclusive, participatory methods more relevant than ever for women and marginalized populations.
Conclusion
This article highlights how feminist participatory methods are a valuable tool for scholars seeking to pivot from conducting gender-aware fieldwork to gender-transformative fieldwork. The examples offered here are holistic and mutually reinforcing when used in combination.
This article also draws on literature that emphasizes how such methods center marginalized voices—especially women—in research processes (e.g., Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Lambert, 2002), while others advocate for a multi-method approach to enrich data and foster a deeper understanding of social issues (Milne, Mitchell, & de Lange, 2012). Other methods have also been suggested as complementary forms of data, focusing on different feminist participatory techniques, such as photovoice or participatory action research (Wang & Burris, 1997).
They are not simply compatible—motile ethnography, digital storytelling, and counter-mapping can interact within the same investigation. The outcome can be synergistic. They are meaningful approaches that work together to center women in global studies and account for all underrepresented community members, which helps lead to more reliable scientific outcomes. Inclusive research practices can increase sample sizes, enhance the reliability and validity of samples, shift methodological paradigms, and contribute to the evolution of epistemologies. The scientific method is simultaneously a process of elimination and a postmodern form of knowledge creation and organization. More accurately accounting for women in fieldwork helps create the drivers for both directions in this process and allows new knowledge to emerge, helping us see what might have been invisible or misunderstood previously. This article discusses ways to help center women in fieldwork; still, gender inclusivity entails centering women from the beginning to the end of the entire research process and in the resulting development practices.
Moreover, inclusive research practices are crucial for making informed policy decisions that enhance measurable well-being across societies. Inclusive praxis-oriented scholarship can influence policies, organizational practices, and social justice debates. Feminist ethnography has demonstrated its potential to bridge the scholarly and applied development worlds in public health, social work, and psychology in the Global North. It is poised to do the same in the Global South. Engaged social science has the power to shape political agendas and provide answers to social questions that genuinely impact how people live their lives. Importantly, intersectionality reveals how gender-based empirics are not distinct from empirics based on race, nationality, or gender identity. Research that demarginalizes women is better positioned to do the same for others in power peripheries across society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Our deepest thanks go to the African women who shared their stories with trust and courage, and shaped the heart of this research. The authors are also grateful to Allison Furniss of the University of Cape Town for her insightful editorial guidance on an early draft.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is supported by Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; National Security Education Program; UK Research and Innovation.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.