NCJ Number
210318
Date Published
2005
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This chapter explores how institutionalized forms of power and violence impacted the process of researching and interviewing women former political prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1997 and 1998.
Abstract
Ethnographic studies of political violence have come under feminist critique in the past for obscuring or even ignoring the war-time experiences of non-combatant women and children. As feminist scholars who set out to research these women quickly learned, there are varied and complex issues and barriers involved with researching women whose communities have been affected by violence. The current analysis explores these complex issues through an examination of the author’s ethnographic research on 37 women political prisoners in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s. The analysis focused on the role of the state in constraining access to prisoners and in shaping the definitions of legitimate versus illegitimate research. The author also explored the ways in which the paramilitary environment influenced the research process, particularly in regards to the prohibitions on talking to “outsiders.” Another challenging aspect of researching former women political prisoners was the barriers to access put in place by the community in response to social norms and gendered controls over behavior. The author also discusses the process of analyzing the interviews in terms of the power the researcher exerts by writing about another’s life. Feminist standpoint epistemology offers a recognition of the power of the researcher, yet is it up to the researcher to exercise ethical choices in the course of social research. Notes, bibliography