Research as Resistance:
How can research build our movements?

APWLD Feminist Knowledge, Learning and Publications (FKLP) Programme

Research is a political act. Peoples’ research begins with challenging the idea that communities don’t have enough understanding of their own issues, nor enough knowledge for critical analysis and action. They do. When viewed from a ‘peoples’ research’ perspective, research stops becoming simply a set of methodologies and tools but an act of larger resistance that allows people to use information and evidence to challenge power and reclaim sovereign power over their own lives. 

In May 2024, 30 activists, researchers and academics from South East Asia, South Asia, East Asia, Central Asia and the Pacific gathered at a convening on Research as Resistance: Peoples Research for Movement Building in Chiang Mai, Thailand, hosted by APWLD.  Together we explored the ways we do research, including why and how our use of research has grown and evolved with time and context. We also collectively reflected on the ways research has supported and expanded our activism and our movements for Development Justice and women’s human rights. 

Here’s what we learned: 

It is critical that the politics and values we hold inform the design and the process of research. For research to be feminist and truly participatory, research needs to embody those values at every stage and have in-built systems of accountability for ourselves as well.
 
We use research to challenge colonial narratives, to produce our own knowledge and evidence that centers women’s voices, their traditional knowledge and ways of knowing. Feminist research is also a form of resistance, where communities in the Global South articulate their experiences and lived realities in their own languages, through other forms of communication and from their own perspectives. This process involves not only identifying what has been lost due to colonial impacts, such as traditional knowledge and resources. But also strategising ways to reclaim and restore these vital aspects of community life, such as in the practice of agroecology and food sovereignty and in honouring the dignity of life of all living beings.

Knowledge can be co-created and co-authored in respectful and feminist ways grounded in the realities and needs of grassroots communities. For instance, we heard about centering place and land in research that is done together with Indigenous Peoples, in integrating systems of accountability into the research process and in the authorship of research that is published. 

There is no blueprint for the ‘how’ of Feminist Participatory Action research or in co-designing a research journey. It’s a constant negotiation and effort that is built over time. And there are also challenges from within academia to recognise or fund feminist research, which takes painstaking and sustained advocacy.

Research is also about relationships and building those relationships with care, trust and genuine intention. Finding ways to connect with communities, for example, by way of spending time, sharing food or chatting together, are integral parts to the research process. This challenges the idea that research methods are only formal, technical tools.

Documentation, record keeping and archiving our own herstories is critically important as preparation for a time when we can access meaningful justice, but also as preparation for never forgetting injustice done as we lose people to age and time. Research and documentation is a way of restoring dignity that is taken away from people.

The language we use in our research can decide who gets to tell the story and how, and to/for whom. We often produce research in English but it is vital that we don’t lose the expression and understanding in our diverse languages; to see language use as not simply text, but also through the multitude of ways meaning is expressed. Some words like ‘violent extremism’ for instance had no equivalent words in some contexts and so needed to be related through women’s experiences.

We need to confront the use of AI and the ethics of its use within our research. This includes AI as the technology but also the impacts of its development on various groups of people, including workers, across its entire lifecycle. The trajectory of its development has interconnected social, economic and political implications for communities and therefore, for movements working towards Development Justice. 

Research can bridge the distance between policy conversations and grassroots movements, especially in a context where technical concepts are being used to intentionally confuse and keep the conversation distant from people most impacted. We heard from activists who are doing the critical work of translating and bridging this distance between policy and practice, researching lived impacts of policies and communicating policies in turn to people.

Where we do research can mean several things. We spoke about ‘place’ as a participant in research and about research that happens across borders and struggles and within sites of technology. But it is also about meeting women where they are — literally or figuratively — with the conversations they want to and are willing to have. Sometimes, that also means finding ways to listen to the things women cannot or may not be allowed to say.

Feminist care for researchers and participants of research is an underrated but vital need, both to practice and receive. While this can look different for people across contexts and cultures, within research practice there are ways to take time and space to understand impacts of lived experiences on the body and mind of both communities and researchers themselves. 

Research sometimes travels over long distances and evolves through time, going where people, activism intention and movement hopes are: in grassroots communities and at local and national level it travels through memory initiatives like sharing spaces, community gatherings, museums and more. At regional and global levels, it travels as advocacy, international mechanisms and peoples’ tribunals, among others.

Research has rich afterlives, evolving through forms such as theatre, art, music, poetry, statues of peace, museums, solidarity exchanges, alliances and more, taking new forms so peoples’ movements respond to take power and challenge power effectively.