Swimming Upstream: System-wide Constraints of Policy Relevant and Politically Engaged Feminist Research

The inherently political orientation of feminist scholarship calls for careful examinations of how feminist knowledge is co-generated, interpreted across broader scholarly and policy debates, and mobilized across the policy and political arenas. Efforts to politically situate feminist research and articulate standpoints that prioritize the lived experiences of the most marginal subjects of observed political emancipatory projects are not enough to avoid research extractivism and tokenism of marginalized identities. Feminist researchers have the responsibility to ensure careful knowledge translation between research participants and the broader scholarly community, as well as key policy arenas in which feminist political projects are implicated. However, politically deploying feminist agendas towards emancipatory struggles requires resources that are generally unrecognized in traditional academic settings and research excellence frameworks. To support collective thinking about pre-requisites for decolonial and policy-oriented feminist research, this article highlights the triple burden of feminist researchers involved in this work: decolonial knowledge co-production, scholarly and policy knowledge translation, and political knowledge mobilization. Drawing on a case study of a two-stage research project conducted with Indigenous women resisting large-scale mining in Guatemala, I highlight the complexities of feminist scholarly engagement in overcoming the epistemic dissonance of decolonial knowledge and mainstream policy debates.