Exploring women's care for the local environment: a community-based feminist participatory research approach

Sewell, Sandra;Harris, Nonie

Abstract

We give an account here of a community-based research strategy designed to explore and understand women's care for the environment. Within a feminist participatory framework, we employed three methods – local history research, in-depth individual interviews and a photovoice project – to engage women in a small town in south-east Queensland to reflect on and illustrate their practices of environmental care. The findings affirm the need for community researchers to include the physical environment in definitions of 'community', to attend to the different ways men and women may view the principles and practices of environmental care, and to consider a variety of data-gathering methods, both verbal and visual, in their work with women. It is, we suggest, a researcher's attention to context and the use of a combination of research methods that best enable women to give voice to their environmental knowledge and practices.

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Community Development Journal

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1468-2656

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Oxford University Press

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DOI

10.1093/cdj/bsv012