Speculative Method-Making for Feminist Futures: Insights from Black Feminist Science and Afrofuturist Work
Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: How can black feminist science and Afrofuturism inform the crafting of methods for future research? Can their strategies for visioning alternative worlds help shape a methodological scaffold to guide the doing of empirical speculative research? The article engages with these questions while drawing on the author’s experience on a youth futures project. The article identifies the challenges of empirical, speculative projects – the difficulties for participants in breaking away from the dead weight of the present and the difficulties for researchers in engendering research that allows newness – surprising and radical imaginaries of the future – to emerge. By exploring relevant ideas from the worlds of creative Afrofuturism and black feminist science, the article proposes a set of methodological prompts that may help understand and address these challenges. These prompts are also an attempt to construct a distinctive intellectual and ethical compass to guide everyday research practice, and are offered in a spirit of experimentation, to be used, amended, or selectively ignored by fellow speculative researchers. The intention is to support a form of speculative research that does not foreclose on the radical and liberatory possibilities of futurity advanced by black feminist creativity and scholarship.
Source: Australian Feminist Studies
Author: Esther Priyadharshini
Institution: University of East Anglia
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4393995016