Our short viewpoint article on methods is out!
We recently published a viewpoint article in the Journal of Public Space called 'Locating Young Women in Public Space. A Feminist Spatial Researcher-in-Residence Model' (You can access our article here, or get in touch with us)
In the article we address how because young women have largely been left out of public space design and planning processes, there is a need for meaningful knowledge production (and methods!) to be centred on, and grounded within, this group.
More specifically, we propose and evaluate our feminist spatial researcher-in-residence methodology for engaging young women in design and planning processes. The model is one we developed for a series of peer research projects ( the Making Space for Girls and the Young Researchers-in-Residence projects) on gender and perceptions of public space, with individuals who identify as girls and young women in the UK from April 2022 to October 2023. We first give an overview of our method which focuses on peer research – notably the researcher-in-residence model – and then go on to discuss two central aspects of our method: (un)learning and visual methods.
We argue that this approach, which contrasts traditional methods of doing research with young people (e.g. surveying), gives us ways of exploring the banality (eg. benches) and complexity (feelings of safety) of young women’s experiences of the public realm; and allows research participants to have greater agency in representing their own
lifeworlds.
In our view, it is essential to value the tacit knowledge that young women and girls have in meaningful and attentive ways if we are to create an inclusive public realm.
Here are a few of our favourite lines from the article:
“In Hemel Hempstead, when we asked the Researchers ‘do you feel safe in your local area?’ they all responded: ‘yes’. When we followed this with conversations their answers seemed incongruous. In many cases they felt safe because they were taking precautionary measures to avoid feeling unsafe. This exercise revealed to us that when you allow people the time to share their lived experiences with you, rather than answer tick box survey questions, you get very different results.” (103)
“In Clapham, after reviewing existing examples of spaces designed explicitly for teenage girls, the Researchers designed a local amenity ‘for them’. One Researcher’s design suggested simply adding an armrest to a low brick wall on her estate that she and her friends were already using as a bench. Her design exposes that visual methods may allow individuals to express their lifeworlds in novel ways which celebrate unheroic spaces.” (104)
"[A feminist spatial researcher-in-residence model] may attentively allow researchers to value the tacit knowledge that young women and girls have in ways that are not extractive but that foster an exchange of skills, resources, knowledge, and accreditations” (106).