Dr Lili Schwoerer

Qualitative research literature discusses how power shapes the interview process and the resulting data and explores the epistemic basis for interview research theoretically. However, processes of negotiating epistemic authority in the interview situation, and in data analysis, are investigated less frequently. This paper draws on 34 interviews with social science academics interested in gender, feminist and queer studies in four English universities to reflect on the epistemological challenges of researching social researchers about their work. Through this, it contributes to explorations of how, in qualitative interviewing and data analysis, we can combine a critical reading of interview data with a commitment to respondents’ accounts of their realities. I argue that Black, anti-colonial, queer, feminist epistemological approaches can be well suited to navigate this challenge. I advocate for an epistemic reflexivity that acknowledges the fluidity of speaker positions while taking structural power relations, and their effects on epistemology, seriously.

This article explores how the academic field of gender and feminist studies in England represents itself, by drawing on a discourse analysis of online descriptions from websites of all gender and feminist studies degree programmes and departments in English universities, all but one of which are graduate degrees. Foregrounding the context of the neoliberal university, in which feminist and gender knowledge is simultaneously marginalised and mainstreamed, the article asks how representations of the field are shaped by the marketisation of higher education. This analysis reveals a disjuncture between two representative logics: while most feminist, gender studies and queer scholarship relies on anti-essentialist epistemologies and ontologies, the dominant logic of representation in contemporary universities understands difference as static and representable. This representability enables and is in turn facilitated by marketisation.

This article draws on both authors’ PhD projects to consider how academic activism can respond to marketisation and “audit culture” without exceptionalising these “crises”. By situating perceived “crises” in UK Higher Education within a longer trajectory of colonial capital appropriation, we argue that academic activism should be wary of reformist approaches to audit and marketisation, and of defending universities and critical knowledge production within them. We think with recent work on university abolition and abolitionist feminism, to think through our complicity in reproducing universities and imagine “non-reformist reforms” while keeping in mind the larger aim of abolition. We argue that such an abolitionist feminist praxis should begin by acknowledging our complex entanglement with the institutions in which we work, but rather than considering this to be an impasse, to organise in coalition with those situated differently against and beyond the university.