Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship

Front matter

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Maria do Mar Pereira’s work is a compelling and timely feminist ethnography of academic life that explores processes of academic valuation — how do academics determine what constitutes ‘proper’ knowledge? Pereira turns particular attention to women’s, gender, and feminist studies’ scholarship and asks how work produced in the field gets imagined as proper knowledge — or as improper knowledge — and how this status is shaped by the institutionalization of the field, the corporatization of the university, the increased precarity of the academic job market, and the dictates of the ‘performative university’ which promises scholars in the field recognition and legibility so long as they comply with the demands of productivity and hierarchy that mark the new university. Pereira’s book is essential reading for feminist scholars invested in understanding the place of the field in the university, and interested in exploring how the university and its dictates and demands has shaped feminist knowledge production.

Contents

List offigures xi List of abbreviations xii Acknowledgements xiii Notes on the presentation of material xvii Introduction 1

1 An outsider within? The position and status of WGFS in academia 28

2 Pushing and pulling the boundaries of knowledge: A feminist theory of epistemic status 44

Introduction

This book has been 10 years in the making, which means that for over a decade I have been asked by colleagues, friends, students, taxi drivers what it is about. I quickly learned that memorising a one-sentence description — the so-called ‘elevator pitch’ — is key, and soon lost count of how many times I used mine. ‘I’m analysing the discourses that circulate in academia about the extent to which women’s and gender studies can produce [cue finger-dance'] “proper” scientific knowledge, and how feminist academics negotiate those discourses’. Women’s, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) scholars? from different generations and locations often responded with a sigh, knowing smile, rolling of the eyes, raising of the eyebrows, vigorous nod or sudden jolt to attention; they were clearly familiar with those discourses and negotiations. Many recounted personal experiences in detail, others hinted at stories left untold — ‘argh, if you knew the things I’ve heard in my university!’ or “if I received [insert relevant currency here] every time I’m told that gender studies is too ideological to count as a real academic field. ..’. These reactions, and much of the international literature on WGFS’ institutionalisation, show that the experience of encountering claims that ‘WGFS is not quite proper academic knowledge’ is shared by many scholars (although it takes very different forms across countries, disciplines, institutions, periods). It also shows that this experience can have significant impacts. In my case, the frequency and stifling effects of those encounters while studying Sociology as an undergraduate student in Lisbon in the early 2000s would eventually become the main impetus for the decision to leave Portugal and continue studying elsewhere. It would also trigger a desire to study these negotiations of WGFS’ epistemic status. I define this as the degree to which, and terms in which, a knowledge claim, or entire field, is recognised as fulfilling the requisite criteria to be considered credible and relevant knowledge, however those criteria are defined in specific spaces, communities and moments. Academics within and outside WGFS are involved in negotiations of epistemic status every day and are well-versed in their language and rituals. Nevertheless, at the centre of these (wearingly) familiar negotiations we can find complex processes and relationships that raise challenging questions about power, inequality and the production and legitimation of knowledge. These questions demand close examination, both using the valuable analytical tools created by feminist and critical scholars who have long problematised epistemic practice, and also developing new tools to make sense of the complex manifestations of these negotiations in times of intense academic and social change.

That is the collective project to which I contribute with this book, a feminist ethnography of academia. It examines several sites of everyday academic work and sociability to explore how academics demarcate the boundaries of “proper” knowledge, and how WGFS scholarship gets positioned in relation to those boundaries. I conceptualise academic practice as shaped by ongoing struggles over the definition of, and the power to define, what can count as ‘proper’ knowledge, and should therefore be accepted, funded or certified as such. I draw on long-term fieldwork in Portugal, and participant observation in the UK, US, Sweden, and at international academic conferences throughout the world, and I ask: How is WGES spoken about in daily academic interactions? To what extent, and in what conditions, is its epistemic status recognised? How does WGFS’ epistemic status shape, and get shaped through, the institutionalisation of the field? How are all these relations affected by broader processes of local and international academic change, such as funding cutbacks, the marketisation and metricisation of higher education (HE), or the intensification, extensification and casualisation of academic labour? By asking these questions, I hope to show that understandings of what counts as ‘proper’ knowledge ‘are not the tranquil locus on the basis of which other questions (. . .) may be posed, but that they themselves pose a whole cluster of questions’ (Foucault, 2006 [1969]: 28-29).

The epistemic status of WGFS as a problem

One of the most far-reaching and influential contributions of feminist scholarship is the demonstration that scientific activities, products and institutions are constituted by, and constitutive of, relations of power. Feminists operationalise that insight in different ways (Code, 2006; Crasnow et al., 2015), but they share the view that scientificity is not an inherent property of claims, disciplines or individuals, which is susceptible to ‘objective’ identification and renders them epistemically superior. They see ‘scientific’, ‘proper’, ‘academic’, ‘scholarly’ or ‘authoritative’ as “words of containment, demarcation’ (Walsh, 1995: 91) that limit both the forms of knowledge perceived to be accurate and worthy of consideration, and the types of people recognised as credible knowledge producers (Amancio, 2005; Collins, 1990; Haraway, 1990; Harding, 1991; Kilomba, 2007; Nogueira, 2001). Haraway argues that ‘politics and ethics ground struggles for the contests over what may count as rational knowledge (. . .) [whether] [t]hat is admitted or not’ (1990: 193). For her and other scholars, the classification of something as scientific is not just an epistemic act but also, and crucially, a political one. The stakes in that classification are high: as Harding puts it, ‘whoever gets to define what counts as (. . .) scientific (. . .) also gets a powerful role in shaping the picture of the world that results from scientific research’ (1991: 40).

Conceptualising scientificity through this lens renders the epistemic status of WGFS a problem, in two ways. It is a problem in the sense that the field’s epistemic status is not a given; it is, rather, a complex object that can be empirically analysed, a construction that one can deconstruct. It is a problem also because epistemic status affects local conditions and possibilities for WGFS research and study, and the forms of circulation of WGFS scholarship. It has been demonstrated that the idea that WGFS is not quite proper knowledge can have a detrimental impact on student engagement and on the career prospects, professional opportunities, and well-being of emerging and established WGFS scholars (Griffin, 2005; Jenkins and Keane, 2014; Marchbank and Letherby, 2006; Morley, 1998; Stanley, 1997). Discussing the institutionalisation of WGFS in Italy, Barazzetti et al. explain that:

[t]he general lack of attention to (or open boycotting of) women’s and gender studies on the part of the academic world (. . .) has limited the opportunities of offering (. . .) [WGFS] knowledge to students; (. . .) reduced the ability to do research and theoretical work in this field; (. . .) blocked the growth of new energies and new skills and discouraged those already existent. It has belittled the worth of these studies in students’ eyes; and in particular it has blocked comparison, growth and experimenting with new tools and ways of teaching.

(2002: 201)

WGEFS is certainly not the only field whose ability to produce proper knowledge is questioned; numerous others, within and outside the social sciences and humanities (SSH), have been at the centre of struggles over epistemic status in the distant and recent past.* Nevertheless, the fact that WGFS has generally been framed explicitly as a project of critique of mainstream knowledge production makes negotiations of epistemic status a particularly salient dimension of its institutionalisation. Indeed, claims about epistemic status are one of the means through which those feminist critiques are discounted. The notion that WGFS is not at all, or not entirely, “epistemologically worthwhile’ (Ezequiel, 1999, cited in Le Feuvre and Andriocci, 2002: 261) has been used as justification to dismiss feminist scholars as not qualified to make credible claims about the nature and norms of knowledge production. Because it undermines those efforts of feminist critique, the epistemic belittling of WGFS needs to be problematised. And yet, we must be careful not to presume that WGFS is always and only marginalised in negotiations of epistemic status. It is worth examining feminist academics’ ‘own entanglements in the power-knowledge tango’ and ‘to look more carefully at (. . .) patterns [of power] within and around feminism’ (McNeil, 1993: 168). As I show in the following chapters, power does not operate in linear or straightforward ways in demarcations of the boundaries of proper knowledge, and feminist scholars have contradictory investments in those demarcations. Because epistemic status has such significant, but complex, effects, it is crucial to research its negotiation.

Conducting that research requires travelling across, and creating bridges between, different bodies of literature. Feminist epistemology and other critical theorisations of the politics of knowledge production are invaluable and inescapable, but shed relatively little light on how epistemic categories are actually invoked and understood in everyday, located academic practice. To find insight on this, it is productive to turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS), and the vast literature on the institutionalisation of WGFS, which offer detailed studies of the micro- and macro-level epistemic negotiations which academics engage in daily. Articulating these different strands of inquiry allows us to explore epistemological questions empirically, or rather, to observe how the questions about the nature of knowledge raised by feminist epistemologists and other theorists play out at the level of the daily academic practices problematised by STS and by research on HE and the institutionalisation of WGFS. In chapter | I review the institutionalisation literature; in chapter 2 I show how I have combined feminist epistemology, STS and Foucault to produce a theory of epistemic status.

WGEFS’ status in times of change: Linking the local and the global, the epistemic and the economic

I put that theory to work in an ethnography of academia, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on Portugal. Portugal is a productive case study in many ways. WGEFS emerged relatively “late” there but, as I explain in chapter 3, the turn of the 21st century saw a consolidation of the institutionalisation of the field, against a backdrop of not only profound local and global transformation in academia, but also major national political, social and economic upheaval. As a range of so-called “neoliberal” trends, partly legitimated by a rhetoric of ‘austerity’ — reduction in state funding for universities, intensification of academic labour, marketisation and metricisation of scientific practice, individual and institutional reorientation towards profitability, or multiplication and complexification of auditing regimes — crept gradually into the Portuguese SSH, and eventually became the over-arching and defining modus operandi, negotiations of the epistemic status of WGFS have been intense and undergone significant and complex changes. My initial fieldwork (2008/2009) was carried out when these processes were just beginning and certainly already on scholars’ radar; but nothing could have prepared them (or me!) for the state of affairs they described in the follow-up interviews, conducted in 2015/2016, immediately after the fall of the right-wing government that drove through many of those changes in the intervening years.

Although this particular playing out of governmental decisions and (mis)fortunes is specific to Portugal, the story I tell here is certainly not just a local or national one. As scholars have shown for other countries in the (semi-)periphery of the global academic order (see chapter 6), many of the changes which have recently been implemented locally (e.g. new research evaluation criteria) are inspired by, imported from, and oriented to other countries, particularly the

US and the UK (Aavik et al., 2015; Mountz et al., 2015). The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), for example, regularly provides equivalent official bodies in other countries (from Europe to Asia) advice and support on setting up REF-like exercises there, and a proposal to internationalise the UK REF is being considered (HEFCE, 2014; Matthews, 2014). As a result of this, both the political economy and the epistemic status of academic knowledge is increasingly negotiated across, and through, national boundaries. Publishing in anglophone journals, for example, becomes an ever more important — if not obligatory — means for strengthening the local standing of a scholar or institution. This, of course, bolsters those journals” global centrality, influence and impact factor, reinforcing their status as a site of proper knowledge. The story of contemporary academia is, thus, one where the local and global, the centre and periphery, influence and constitute each other (Sousa Santos, 2005). Therefore, my located ethnography of negotiations of WGFS produces insight not just about a specific country, but also about the countries it frames as benchmark, model and aspiration, or those it seeks to distance itself from, or compete with. More broadly, it sheds light on the structure and impacts of global geopolitical academic hierarchies.

By focusing on the Portuguese context during this period, the book therefore offers rare longitudinal insight into the effects on local WGFS of the rapid but dramatic transnational transformations that have swept academic communities throughout Europe (Liinason and Grenz, 2016) and beyond (Davies and O’Callaghan, 2014; Nash and Owens, 2015). This insight is vital because it situates issues of epistemology within the concrete but changing political economy of academic labour, two levels of inquiry often addressed separately. Articulating epistemology with political economy, local with global, enables us to better understand the complex relations between contemporary transnational regimes of academic governance, processes of macro- and micro-level change in academic institutions, and the epistemic categories that academics use every day. At this moment in time, WGFS looks very different throughout the world and faces distinct challenges in each local context. Whereas in some places it has become increasingly respected (as is, arguably, the case in Portugal), in others it currently finds itself under fierce attack; in some it has even become the object of moral panics beyond the academy, as political and religious figures in France, Italy, Poland, Brazil and elsewhere denounce ‘gender ideology’ as a foreign “pseudo-science’ (Grabowska, 2016) threatening national identity, values and traditions, and undermining the ‘so called “natural ordering of society”? (Fiore and Habed, 2016). We must, of course, remain attentive to the local specificities of the triumphs, trials and tribulations of WGFS. . . . But linking local with global, and epistemology with political economy, will add to, and help us go beyond, strictly national debates about contemporary WGFS, hopefully generating new forms of transnational insight and solidarity, better equipped to engage watchfully and critically with current academic and political changes and to pro-actively resist their more pernicious effects on WGFS (and beyond).

Speaking of ‘science’ and ‘women’s, gender, feminist studies’

At the centre of this project are the categories of science and scientificity, terms defined in varying ways. Because I aim to examine precisely those processes of definition, I leave the terms open and do not provide my own a priori definition; it is, nevertheless, important to situate my use of them. As Harding notes,

Anglo-American conventions (. . .) [restrict] the term ‘science’ in its central or paradigmatic meaning to the natural sciences, in contrast to the European practice of seeing as equally deserving of the label ‘scientific knowledgeseeking’ those modes of systematic (. . .) inquiry that are favored in the social sciences and even in humanities and arts.

(1991: 306)

Indeed, in many countries and languages in continental Europe, Latin America and elsewhere (see, for example, Petersen, 2003 on Danish), the categories of ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ are used to refer also to the SSH° and their use does not necessarily presume or signify an acclamation of positivist notions of science and objectivity. Consider, for example, Braidotti’s definition of WGFS: ‘[w]omen’s studies is a field of scientific and pedagogical activity devoted to improving the status of women (. . .). Women’s studies is a critical project in so far as it examines how science perpetuates forms of (. . .) exclusion’ (2000: 33, my emphases). This illustrates one of the book’s key arguments: it is crucial to locate demarcations of scientificity, because ‘situation and place are constitutive, if not determinative, of how problems are defined, evidence recognized, read, and interpreted: thus, (. . .) place [is] not merely context or backdrop’ (Code, 2006: 161). Because much of my empirical material was collected in non-anglophone sites, I use the category ‘science’ to refer very broadly to academic or scholarly forms of knowledge production, however this may be defined contextually — which is precisely the object of my analysis. Adopting this broader definition also has another important effect: it contributes to disrupt the problematic tendency within STS scholarship to equate studies of scientific practice with studies of the natural or ‘hard’ sciences, an equation which several feminists have denounced and resisted (Mayer, 2009; Petersen, 2003; Whelan, 2001).

I use the label women’s, gender, feminist studies or WGFS to speak of the field” of research and teaching on women and gender and/or conducted from a feminist perspective, a decision that also requires elucidation, as the field’s name has been a fiercely and intensely debated issue (see chapter 1; Braidotti, 2002; Hemmings, 2006). In Portugal, for example, there is even debate about whether that debate is actually a debate! Portuguese scholars use different terms and there is some published discussion on their relative merits (Ferreira, 2001, 2004; Macedo, 2000; Magalhães, 2001). Referring to this, Ferreira notes that ‘[t]he issue [of naming] is, evidently, complex and continues to be polemical’ (2001: 22*). However, in the very same 2001 issue of the WGFS journal ex aequo, Magalhães explains that some of the WGFS scholars she interviewed saw it ‘as a debate that is already cold’ (2001: 46*). One of my interviewees described the current situation as one where disagreement about naming persists, but because scholars have realised that a consensus will never be reached, they continue using their different names independently and naming has ceased to be the object of active debate. To reflect this, APEM (the Portuguese Women’s Studies Association) has used the formulation Estudos sobre as Mulheres/Estudos Feministas/Estudos de Género (Women’s Studies/Feminist Studies/Gender Studies) when referring to the field (Pinto, 2009). This is one reason why I initially chose to speak of WGFS when referring to the field in Portugal. Since I started this research and began presenting on it in Portugal, some colleagues have begun using my condensed formulation to name the field (for example, Tavares, 2015; Torres et al., 2015), and a couple have identified the creation of that name as one of my project’s main contributions to Portuguese WGFS. At this level, the field itself has been shaped — although only on a small scale — by the research on it, and WGFS (or EMGF in Portuguese) is now a term with actual community currency, rather than just my analytic shorthand.

I use the term WGFS also to keep the boundaries of my object as open as possible. I am interested in examining the status both of scholarship explicitly framed as belonging to WGFS, and of research that focuses on WGFS themes or takes up WGFS perspectives but is presented as grounded in a particular mainstream’ discipline. I am also keen to explore the sometimes fraught relationship between those who study gender or women from feminist perspectives, and those who study gender or women but explicitly distance themselves from feminism. Indeed, the boundaries between these different categories are sometimes extremely fuzzy, namely because — as I will show — many scholars describe their work, frame their relationship to WGFS, and name the field differently depending on the context in which, and audience for whom, they speak. In this sense, one can argue — as I do in chapter 1 — that naming decisions are a key element and tool of negotiations of epistemic status, rather than a pre-existing basis for them. Therefore, I use WGFS as a broad umbrella term with contested meanings and changing boundaries. I do not presume an overlap, equivalence or necessary articulation between women, gender, and feminism, and I do not demarcate a priori what is WGFS scholarship and who is a WGFS scholar. When identifying interviewees and speakers throughout the book as ‘WGFS’ or ‘non-WGFS’ scholars, I draw on their own (sometimes shifting) self-categorisation as affirmed in their overall work, in that particular presentation or in the interview.

An ethnography of academia

Doing research on one’s peers is not something that scholars often do. For Wisniewski, the relative lack of ethnographies of HE (as opposed to primary and secondary education) is a form of ‘collective “averted gaze” ’ from the inner workings of academia (2000: 5). Sheehan notes that studying other academics is considered

“bad taste” (1993a: 255) and Butterwick and Dawson describe it as “one of the greatest taboos’ (2005: 52). Friese argues that this is because “[aJcademics don’t like to be made into objects. They like to be the subjects who turn others into objects’ (2001: 288). In a powerful illustration of the difficulty of conducting such work, Williams and Klemmer start an article on ethnographies of academia with a box offering the following text: “This space is where I would have liked to present a complete ethnography of [an STS seminar]. (. . .) But some of my colleagues told me that studying them would be problematic’ (1997: 165). And yet, academic communities make excellent objects of study.

Even in the simplest academic interaction, there is often much happening. Sitting in a campus café, a group of young scholars discuss the papers they hope to present at the upcoming conference of a national sociological association; one advises another not to submit her abstract to the gender strand because interventions there are too political and unsociological. After the public viva for a doctoral thesis, the examiners meet privately to discuss whether the feminist qualitative methodology used is rigorous enough to make the thesis acceptable scholarship. At a well-attended book launch, a feminist scholar argues that being attentive to contemporary women’s studies research will allow mainstream social scientists to produce better knowledge. A lecturer tells an undergraduate class that feminist critiques played an invaluable role in the development of a field, but were not always sufficiently rigorous; two students dispute this. These scenes, all of them true descriptions of real-life events, can be understood as instances of negotiation of the epistemic status of WGFS. But how might one observe and analyse situations like these, both hyper-visible — feminist and other scholars have been reflecting on them for decades, as I discuss in chapter 1 — and invisible — because they are so frequent and mundane, ‘because [they are] too much on the surface of things’ (Foucault, 1989 [1969]: 58). What methods can be used (and with what effects, possibilities and limitations) to explore this hyper-visible and invisible boundary-work? And what happens when one researches the researchers? These are important questions which I analyse at length elsewhere (Pereira, 2011, 2013) but unfortunately cannot do full justice to here. What I offer, instead, is a brief characterisation of my fieldwork, flagging up some of the complex challenges of managing power, positionality and perspective in fieldwork with, and about, fellow scholars.

I would argue that boundary-work over WGFS can best be analysed through feminist discursive ethnography; in other words, through a feminist ethnography that focuses on discourse. Ethnography is especially suited to a study of ‘local culture-in-the-making’ (Franklin, 1995: 179) and ‘knowledge-in-the-making’ (Beaulieu, 2010: 454), and to a conceptualisation of objects as ‘accomplishments’ rather than facts (Pollner and Emerson, 2007: 125). As I explain in chapter 1, engaging with the ongoing-ness and everyday-ness of negotiations of epistemic status is a key aim of this project, because those are dimensions hinted at, but not explored, in the literature on the institutionalisation of WGFS. Using ethnography to analyse how WGFS’ epistemic status is accomplished is, thus, an epistemic game-changer because it flips the questions we can ask and things we can see. Defining ethnography is, however, more complicated than the lines opening this paragraph might make it seem. Ethnography itself is an object of intense contestation (Atkinson et al., 2007; Riles, 2006) and boundary-work over what constitutes proper ethnography is ancient and ongoing. One axis of boundary-work relates to the fact that ethnography has been central to the affirmation and demarcation of disciplinary identity in anthropology and other fields, serving as “a valued object of a professional culture”, with a “heavy symbolic, identity-defining load” (Marcus, 2009: 4-5). But ethnography is the object of boundary-work not only because it is highly valued, but also because it has relatively little value. Indeed, ethnographic work is often dismissed as not quite scientific by quantitative scholars or scholars outside the social sciences (Forsythe, 2001; Monahan and Fisher, 2010), and so ethnographers are regularly involved in negotiations over whether their method lies on the ‘right’ side of boundaries.

My ethnography is focused on discourse. Due to their daunting diversity, analyses of discourse also do not lend themselves to one uniting and stable description (Nogueira, 2001). I adopt a critical discursive approach that is centrally (albeit not exclusively) inspired by Foucault. The author’s recurring assertion that his proposals ‘are not intended as methodological imperatives’ (1978 [1976]: 78) have led scholars to argue that Foucault’s methodological contributions should be seen as flexible strategies (Ferguson, 1991; Tamboukou and Ball, 2003).º I find Foucault’s notion of genealogy — developed in Discipline and Punish (1979 [1975]) and his later work — particularly productive and flexible, as it is presented both as a methodological device and a mode of critical engagement with the power-effects of scientificity. According to Foucault, genealogy focuses on ‘the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice-clash of power axis’ (2003 [1976]: 178). It requires not just undertaking a ‘meticulous rediscovery of struggles’, but also ‘mak[ing] use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics’ (2003 [1976]: 8). Foucault defines those tactics as follows:

[Genealogy] is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off against the (. . .) theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy (. . .) in the name of a true body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few.

(2003 [1976]: 9)

Therefore, for Foucault, genealogies of struggles over scientificity are ‘theoreticopolitical’ (1991 [1980]: 76) acts that can contribute to disrupting the normalisation of the truth- and power-effects of the category of the scientific. Genealogies can do this because they help to ‘dereif[y] contemporary practices and objects, robbing them of their traditional ahistorical, foundationalistic legitimations’ (Fraser, 1996: 19) and thus they question the apparent inevitability and legitimacy of the disqualification of particular knowledges.

IO Introduction

It is in that vein that I approach negotiations of epistemic status here. Much like Petersen (2003) did in her own analysis of scientific boundary-work, I adopt a Foucauldian understanding of discourse ‘as practices that systematically form the objects [and subjects] of which they speak’ (2006 [1969]: 54). With Foucault, I conceptualise discursive practices as producing a ‘delimitation of a field of objects, the definition of a /egitimate perspective for the agent of the knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories’ (1977 [1971]: 199, my emphases). I am also persuaded by his argument that we need to focus not just on the ‘formation’ of discourses ‘but [also] the effects in the real to which they are linked’ (1991 [1980]: 85), and hence I seek to situate discourses about epistemic status within the broader political economy of contemporary academic practice. In attempting to do this, I have found it useful to articulate Foucault’s perspective with other strands of discourse analysis. Of particular relevance is research which problematises the discursive strategies and repertoires used by scientists when making claims about their, and others’, work (Gilbert and Mulkay, 1984; Lee and Roth, 2004; Potter, 1996; Potter and Mulkay, 1985). Therefore, I understand ‘discourse’ both in the broader Foucauldian sense, and in the narrower sense given to it within that body of STS research, which frames discourse as specific instances of speech or text.

In my use of ‘ethnography (. . .) with discourse analysis components (. . .) [as a method] furnish[ing] the optics for viewing the process of knowledge production as “constructive” rather than descriptive’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1995: 141), I am also inspired by the ethnographic tradition developed in STS, particularly following Latour and Woolgar’s (1986 [1979]) and Knorr-Cetina’s (1983, 1995) influential studies in laboratories. Mine is not, however, a ‘typical’ STS ethnography. Much of the methodological STS literature (Hess, 2007: 239 is one example) presumes that its objects are the natural and techno-sciences. Therefore, conventional STS methods are not always suited to research on practices and communities not concentrated in laboratories or analogous settings, as is the case with the SSH (Beaulieu, 2010). Several feminist scholars have denounced the relative marginalisation of the SSH as research objects in STS and argued that it reinforces a hierarchical demarcation of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ sciences (Cervinkova et al., 2007; Mayer, 2009; Petersen, 2003). Whelan describes this as in itself an instance of boundary-work (and devaluing of WGFS): ‘[p]hysics is the apex of the natural sciences; studies of physics represent the apex of STS. Feminists who study the soft sciences are, by extension, relatively unskilled labourers doing inconsequential namby-pamby work. Here we have an extraordinary piece of boundary-work’ (2001: 557). The ‘lack of observable laboratories’ in the SSH has led researchers to ‘become imaginative as [to] where to find our research subjects/objects’ (Cervinkova et al., 2007: 6). It has taken ethnographers of the SSH — including myself — to offices, libraries, classes, the internet, canteens, conferences, journals and funding agencies to conduct fieldwork (Beaulieu, 2010; Mair et al., 2013; Petersen, 2003).