“Show Us What You've Got”: From Experiences of Undoing to Mobilizing Agentic Vulnerability in Research

Abstract

This inquiry both builds on and extends exploration into gendered research through a focus on researcher vulnerability and its associated ethics. We discuss six critical vignettes across Western and Eastern contexts in which female re-searchers are “undone” and subsequently “redone” during their research endeavors. We draw upon Butler's work on gender and vulnerability, theorized as a subset of precarity. Attention is drawn to attempts to reframe, understand, and mobilize vulnerability differently, as a form of resistance, research activism, and emancipatory enactment. We propose agentic vulnerability as speaking to felt moments of vulnerability experienced in field research. We extend this contribution into a theorization of the researcher as activist, outlining practical applications of this concept. Ultimately, we seek to reposition agentic vulnerability in institutional research as a source of new ethics, research practices, and activism. Full paper available at https://doi-org.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/10.1111/gwao.12769

Keywords: agentic vulnerability, body, ethics, feminist autoethnography, gender