Extra/ordinary Feminist Methodologies
Dr. Pengfei Zhao, McGill University, Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE)
Feb 14, 2025 at 10:30am-12:00 (EST)
What constitutes feminist social and educational research? Or what makes a feminist study? These foundational questions served as catalysts for rich dialogue when I taught feminist methodology class, as my students and I embarked on a collective exploration of their complexity. In this talk, I engage these questions both conceptually and narratively. Thinking with the audience as well as my collaborators and former students, I tell a story of becoming a feminist researcher through transnational immigration, reading with my fellow researchers, and laughing and crying with my participants. Essentially, I argue that doing feminist research means to embark on a journey of storying, worlding, and regrounding ourselves in extra/ordinary lived experience.
About the speaker
Dr. Pengfei Zhao is a critical qualitative methodologist with an interdisciplinary background in inquiry methodology, sociology, and cultural studies. In her theoretical and methodological work, she draws from a wide spectrum of theories—from critical theories to contemporary pragmatism, feminism, and post-colonial studies—to formulate a praxis- and social justice-oriented qualitative methodology. She develops scholarship on critical ethnography, feminist and narrative methodology, critical multilingual methodology, and participatory action research. Addressing key methodological issues such as validity, ethics, and translation, Dr. Zhao responds to the ontological, epistemological, ethical, and methodological challenges of conducting qualitative research in a politically troubled and culturally diverse contemporary world. In her empirical work, she uses both Mandarin Chinese and English to perform research in North America, China, and the cross-Pacific transnational context. She is particularly interested in children’s and youth’s identity formation—the gendered and racialized process of socialization, and the various dynamics within and beyond families and communities in perpetuating and/or disrupting the reproduction of social inequality.
