What is knowledge co-production, how does it improve our understanding of society towards its betterment, and how does it contribute to research-led teaching at LSE? The School encourages multi-level engagement in the production of institutional knowledge and student involvement through initiatives such as Change Makers, the Student Education Panel and Curious Minds are Shaping the World alongside Student Union Academic Representatives structures. These foster participation within and across departments. The Department of Gender Studies builds on and advances these efforts by building a community of scholars at all stages of their academic journey to articulate and maintain the links between theory and practice. Its long history of encouraging collaborative relationships with and among students is guided by an ethical commitment to and solidarity with those made marginalized by systems of power and oppression and by the application of interdisciplinary, critical, intersectional, transnational research to learning. Knowledge co-production is a notable example of this.
Feminist epistemological and methodological commitment to collaboration and accountability in knowledge production derives from intersectional struggles to include the perspectives of under-represented and marginalised peoples in order to transform the spaces where knowledge is produced, legitimised taught and implemented. Embedding a critical perspective into existing forms of knowledge production, and the practice such knowledge informs, requires a recognition of the continuous negotiation of epistemic authority and of the politics of location to generate conceptual and methodological innovation across the humanities and the social sciences. Questioning the taken for granted ways of knowing, and giving analytical expression to the epistemic margins, co-production (and the ethos it entails) in research and teaching can offer new insights, concepts, and ideas, and thus strengthen originality and significance of scholarship.
Examples of knowledge co-production include participatory action research. Collaborations with community groups, activists, local authorities, etc. prioritise democratic decision-making and seek to bridge the distance between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’. Although such collaborations cannot fully overcome unequal power relations, especially when working with stigmatised, marginalised, and criminalised groups, they aim to minimise them and provide space for validation and claim-making. Creating an academic environment which makes space for the process of reflexive becoming, proactive improvisation, and co-learning partnerships is a way of implementing feminist praxis in higher education.
A few years ago, Gender Studies, in collaboration with Statistics and the International Inequalities Institute, hosted What We Treasure We Measure, a theatrical engagement with gender inequality where actors produced a human PowerPoint of the Gender Equality Index and engaged students and faculty to consider whether you can put a number on inequality, and if so, what you can do about it? This is reflective of engagement with the pedagogy of the oppressed inspired theatrical forms of education to analyse inequality and oppression and drive social change at the community level.
As a hub for feminist economics analysis and teaching, with close links to the Women’s Budget Group, the Department has for many years hosted annual Autumn Statement watch-along sessions. During these events, our MSc students joined a network of experts from academia and the women’s movement to witness and take part in the application of the conceptual tools of feminist economics to policy in real time. Several of the MSc students have joined the WBG after graduating from LSE.
Experimenting with and expanding on pedagogical approaches are a key part of knowledge co-production, as rethinking the archive teaching in Gender Studies and in Sociology demonstrates. By critically engaging with conventional archives and incorporating alternative archival sources and processes, teaching and learning takes place inside and outside the classroom and provides the space for students to engage with what counts as knowledge, develop research skills, and generate research questions.
Student-led feminist knowledge co-production within the department includes the Feminist Movements Around the World (FMAW) initiative. For some students, FMAW was their first encounter with feminist activism in parts of the world that do not typically receive sustained global news coverage. A significant portion of students whose investment in gender was informed by marginality were able to generate their own interventions and narratives through peer-to-peer education and storytelling. Started during the 2020-21 academic year by Milena D’Atri, it emerged ‘to reclaim the sharing spaces that were lost to the COVID-19… [and] bridge the contradiction between the content of what we study (i.e. the neoliberal illusion of a self-sufficient individual, and how that idea is tied to patriarchal, colonial, racist and capitalist structures) and the ways in which we do it (i.e. through pedagogies that are constructed upon that idea of individuality, in a highly competitive environment, and in 2020/21, from the solitude of our screens). (Milena D’Atri, MSc Gender, Policy & Inequalities 2020-21). Sara Milenkovska continued organising meetings in the 2021-22 cohort, which ‘critically examined the epistemic gap where many of us felt that our histories were missing from mainstream knowledge about feminism… Co-producing knowledge, collaborating and creating coalitions along the way – for me it is the most important aspect of studying gender. This field with its interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, builds on the activism and struggle of many people… (Sara Milenkovska, MSc Gender, Policy & Inequalities 2021-22).
Co-production of knowledge spanning research and the development of an academic profile also involves PhD students who seek to incorporate voices from within and outside academia. The Engenderings blog established in 2011, is run by PhD researchers and a wider editorial collective. Its description highlights that it is “committed to an open and critical engagement that is responsive to different points of view from within and outside academic spaces and welcomes pieces from students, activists, scholars and practitioners”.
Occasionally, the blog publishes work by the Department’s MSc students. Recently, MSc student, Emily Sams, and the editorial collective member, Tomás Ojeda, collaborated to publish Emily’s piece ‘Wednesday, the 28th of June, 2023: Anti-Gender Violence in Canada’. Reflecting on the process, Emily highlighted how the ‘support and co-production of the article helped me refine my arguments and reflect on my own positionality/connection to the subject matter. Even as a master's student, I felt encouraged in my writing and never once belittled for not having all the answers. In the tradition of using citation as a feminist practice of knowledge co-production, Dr Ojeda thoughtfully introduced me to a multitude of scholars...this expanded my own understanding of [the] topic’ (Emily Sams, MSc Gender, Policy and Inequalities 2022-23).
For Tomás Ojeda, collaborating with MSc students is just one of the joys of Engenderings. The blog contributes to “discussions that do not often take place in mainstream academia” since they prioritize “the struggles and resistance strategies put forward by feminists and LGBTIQ+ activists in places we do not hear that often”. The development of Engenderings “has allowed us to establish intergenerational dialogues and interdisciplinary collaborations between MSc and PhD students and faculty”.
The ‘inter-generational’ knowledge co-production that takes place between different cohorts of gender scholars and across varying levels of expertise and rank, is a manifestation of the department’s commitment to creating opportunities for communication and community-building.
Encouraged by the department to pursue interdisciplinary opportunities around LSE, Sanika Sawant (2022-23 MSc Gender student), participated in the Eden Centre’s UN Congress. In partnership with students in the Department of Social Policy, Sanika related research produced in Gender Studies to the United Nation’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The collaborative project came away with the awards for Best position, Best poster, and Overall prize. Working with faculty to advocate for the prominence of gender and social policy perspectives in sustainable development was “extremely useful and interesting” for Sanika as engaging with faculty outside of the classroom gave “a glimpse into how varied, intersectional, complex and nuanced” the study of gender can be when in conversation with other disciplines.
The final examples are the department’s annual PhD conference and the recent symposium on human rights. Nour participated in organising both events and reflects: In both conferences, there was an emphasis on opening up a productive space of dialogue for activists, political organisers, artists, and writers beyond the academy. And in both instances, there was also a focus on different dynamic ways of ‘doing’ knowledge otherwise and recognizing it as a collective and collaborative process (Nour Almazidi, current PhD researcher). Nour found that the two conferences helped to enrich her own research. In her project with stateless people and their political struggles in Kuwait, she is dedicated to “taking seriously people’s oral narratives and life experiences as the location of theory and of meaning-making knowledges”.
Students not only keenly participate in such endeavours, but value the collaborative efforts of departmental research students, faculty and administrative staff. The department is a Winner of the 2022 LSESU Teaching Award for Departmental Excellence. Gender Studies experimentation in epistemology, methodology, and pedagogy contributes to the expansion and strengthening of critical approaches in social sciences.