Abstract: Interdisciplinarity is one of the current key terms within the field of Feminist, Women and Gender Studies. Although the term is ubiquitous, a single definition remains elusive, and debates around the meanings and practices of interdisciplinarity are ongoing.

Abstract: For a doctoral student, choosing a research method is not a simple, rational act. It is an act that involves an assessment of our position and power within the academic setting, as well as a negotiation of the legitimacy of the method. It is also an act of expressing our values and political commitments. Thus, this choice becomes an opportunity to investigate the ways in which power relations may come to shape both our understandings of ‘legitimate research’ and our performance of that legitimacy. This paper looks into these issues by means of an imagined dialogue (a metalogue) between a student and a supervisor on the possibility of choosing autoethnography as a method for a doctoral project. As a contested method located within the qualitative paradigm, autoethnography allows me to explore the question of what makes a method a legitimate way of inquiry within the academic context. My interest here is to show how the networks of power within which I am positioned as a doctoral student, with a particular set of values and committments, come to play into the negotiation and performance of the legitimacy of the method. Using Foucault’s discussion of power/knowledge, I am arguing that such networks of power are both external to me, constituting the institutional context within which I am acting, and part of my own self, shaping my values and my performance as an authorized speaker within the academic setting.

Abstract: Over the last decade, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council has been actively working to encourage interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to acquiring and disseminating knowledge in Canada. How interdisciplinarity is understood and how it is translated into practice has been a source of debate, however. In this paper, we examine how we problematised interdisciplinarity and collaboration and how we learned from this process as a student group in the context of Hidden Costs / Invisible Contributions, a large multi-university research project based at the University of Alberta. Students have been involved at a number of levels in this project: our MA, MSc and doctoral research have become intertwined with and integral to the project; we have authored and co-authored papers and presentations, we have assisted in other members’ research, and we have been involved in the SSHRC midterm review. As emerging scholars, in a project which has combined the research and knowledge of both the social sciences and the humanities, we have had to develop our own strategies for negotiating differences. In this paper, we will investigate four key areas that we have identified as potential challenges to successful collaboration: conceptual, methodological, pragmatic and personal differences. In our examination of the difficulties and rewards that we faced as students in each area, we will argue that successful collaborative and interdisciplinary work across the social sciences and humanities requires a reconfiguration of the ways that we are taught to “see” our particular disciplines. We have had to challenge how we understand the language, practice and function of our disciplines and the manner in which we approach this work as individuals. This has been a transformative process for each of us, but also one that has lent a renewed rigour and expanded scope in our own individual work 

Abstract: This review essay considers Linnaeus’s system of botanical nomenclature and the eighteenth-century ‘voyages of discovery’ to the Americas within the framework offered by contemporary feminist science studies. The author uses a feminist methodological approach toward concepts of natural knowledge and knowledge production and summarizes here basic ideas that are part of a larger project that looks at knowledges of particular plants from the Americas and their properties, focusing on one plant still used for fertility in the Guatemalan highlands. In this essay, the author investigates the centrality of natural knowledge to the development of differing historical perspectives on nature as well as the relationship between the development of European botanical sciences and ‘voyages of discovery’ to the Americas.