Critical Feminisms in Team-Based Academic Research: A Parallel Process

Background and Purpose: Claims of critical, feminist, antiracist, and other anti-oppressive approaches to social work scholarship do not always correlate with researchers’ actual integration of these theories into the research process. As with social work practice, social work education has been influenced by market-oriented neoliberal logics which pressure academics to prioritize productivity in research. Such pressures not only limit researchers’ capacity for deep reflection, relationship building, and authentic engagement, they also limit the ability to practice emancipatory stances within the research team itself, leaving graduate students vulnerable to status-based power dynamics and extractive labor practices.

Grounded in a commitment to collaborative, non-hierarchical, and reflexive practice (all qualities characteristic to critical feminisms), this research study pushes against traditional “work productivity” aims and instead emphasizes education, developing scholars, and sharing power in decision-making among faculty and graduate students involved in the research process. In this way, collaboration is the change that impacts the research endeavor itself.

Methods: The research team consists of a tenured faculty member and two doctoral students. Researchers conducted 60 interviews with front-line social workers about the impacts of neoliberal managerialism on their working conditions. For the interviews, purposive sampling was used to select interviewees with attention to how positionality, intersectionality, and context may influence their experiences as social workers.

Throughout the study, the research team challenged “traditional” academic knowledge production by prioritizing an iterative, responsive, non-hierarchical, and collectivist approach to knowledge development. Practices included weekly collaborative reflection and perspective-sharing, critically reflexive memoing on both interviewee narratives and researcher interpretations, ongoing conceptual refinement as themes emerged, and sharing concepts with interviewees with the intention of raising consciousness among participants of the political nature of their working conditions. Emerging findings are presented by all members.

Results: With this study, the research team co-created a model of critical feminist scholarship that resists normative power dynamics within academic team-based research. The team has developed several products along the way to raise awareness among direct-line social workers. For example, they have developed two podcasts on the nature of professional discretion and professional resistance with more than 800 listens. They have presented the methods of their project at their school’s Research Colloquium. They will share equal responsibility in facilitating an upcoming workshop with a group of social work supervisors and practitioners on emerging findings regarding working conditions and will organize group discussion among participants. Acknowledging the interdependence of individual and structural change, this praxis-oriented approach demonstrates how researchers can develop methods that aim to influence social change at multiple levels within social work workplaces, including social work education.

Conclusions and Implications: The research team demonstrated how a collaborative research design that emphasizes co-creation, dialogue, and thoughtful mentorship can resist neoliberal pressures in academia while remaining generative and producing insights that help to improve social work working conditions. This research process raised consciousness among social workers across the state regarding how neoliberal managerialism impacts their working conditions, and brought attention to acts of resistance that social workers might engage in to promote social justice.