Feminist Cartography: Clues to a Feminist Research Policy in Social Psychology

Cartografia Feminista: Pistas para uma Política de Pesquisa Feminista em Psicologia Social

La Cartografía Feminista: Pistas para una Política de Investigatión Feminista en Psicología Social

Abstract

Cartography is an ethical, aesthetic, and political way of doing research and producing knowledge that is insistently inhabited by the unknown with feminism being a powerful tool to analyze power relations. This study aims to map cartography itself to think about how feminist epistemologies and methodologies allow cartography to question itself about the ways in which it functions, its tools, and implications. This is a theoretical text based on a research that interviewed women in prisons in Brazil and Portugal that crosses cartographic clues and feminist inspirations to vouch that research is more about the path we trace than the finished product at the end. We also propose clues for thinking cartography as a policy for producing knowledge inscribed in politics and defend that a feminist approach to cartography can radicalize the production of knowledge based on the perspective of philosophy of difference.

Keywords:
cartography; institutional analysis; feminism; social psychology

Resumo

A cartografia é uma postura ética-estética-política de fazer pesquisa, uma forma de produzir conhecimento habitada insistentemente pelo desconhecido e o feminismo é uma ferramenta potente para analisar as relações de poder. O objetivo deste estudo é cartografar a própria cartografia para pensar de que maneiras, na tessitura de um campo, as epistemologias e metodologias feministas permitem à cartografia interrogar-se a si mesma acerca de seus modos de funcionamento, ferramentas e implicações. Trata-se de artigo teórico de uma pesquisa que entrevistou mulheres em prisões no Brasil e em Portugal. Cruzamos pistas da cartografia com inspirações feministas para mostrar que fazer pesquisa é mais o percurso que traçamos do que um produto pronto ao final. Propomos pistas para entender a cartografia como política de produção de conhecimento inscrito na política e defendemos que uma dobradura feminista no ethos cartográfico pode radicalizar a produção de conhecimento da perspectiva da filosofia da diferença.

Palavras-chave:
cartografia; análise institucional; feminismo; psicologia social

Resumen

La cartografía es una forma ética-estética-política de hacer investigación, una forma de producir conocimiento que está insistentemente habitada por el desconocido, y las prácticas feministas son herramientas poderosas para analizar las relaciones de poder. El objetivo de este estudio es cartografiar la propia cartografía para pensar cómo, en el tejido de un campo, las epistemologías y metodologías feministas permiten a la cartografía interrogarse sobre sus modos de funcionamiento, herramientas e implicaciones. Se trata de un artículo teórico de una investigación realizada a través de entrevistas con mujeres presas en Brasil y Portugal. Cruzamos pistas cartográficas con inspiraciones feministas para mostrar que investigar es más el camino que trazamos que un producto acabado al final. Proponemos pistas para entender la cartografía como una política de producción de conocimiento inscrito en la política y argumentamos que un pliegue feminista del ethos cartográfico puede radicalizar la producción de conocimiento desde la filosofía de la diferencia.

Palabras clave:
cartografia; análisis institucional; feminismo; psicología social

Doing research is producing knowledge, but it is also, somehow, engaging in a process of not-knowing. Diving into the unknown, exploring, seeking to see the inapparent in the face of what seems clear, the different in an equal environment. In cartography, a research project is always something different from what, in the end, presents itself as a “product” - a product that is temporary, circumscribed and precisely for this reason powerful, because it does not seek to be more: a mosaic that, between sometimes blurred, sometimes clearer lines, sharp lines and more delicate ones, it gives shape to a certain arrangement of forces that were possible to follow and create, as a way of producing a reading of a world.

This informs us, researchers, about how research is more a journey than a product: it is the means, the act of researching. In the stumbling blocks along the way, where so many lines intersect, shortening some paths while making others distant, it is possible to create a cartography: a mosaic, a geography, not a map in the meaning given to the word by modern cartography, which contain borders that separate what is and what is not the map (Ingold, 2022), but a possible landscape (Rolnik, 2014), always unique.

If we can call this landscape a map, it is only in the meaning that Tim Ingold (2022) attributes to the term when thinking about the differences between the maps produced by modern cartography and those supported by oral stories. The author points out that these last maps rarely exceed the period in which they were produced, and are then passed on in the form of oral stories that tell routes, journeys, and directions for a walk. These stories can be accompanied by gestures, such as drawings and hands that gesticulate to give visibility to the lines that trace/inform the path, including being written on pieces of paper and scribble. Thus, a sketch of a provisional map is created, which can be thrown away as soon as the route is completed. In these scribbled maps, the lines are “lines of movement: and the journey that the line makes is retraced by itself on the terrain” (Ingold, 2022). That is why this type of map does not usually contain borders, because they are not intended to represent a certain territory, or even to mark the spatial locations of the elements included in those borders. The scribbled map consists of the lines that create it, nothing more, nothing less (Ingold, 2022).

From this perspective, if cartography, as a methodology and research policy, is not a map understood as having an enclosed and delimited structure, it can be a sketched map. A sketch that speaks of a field that is produced from fragments collected in different contexts, from multiple interactions with human and nonhuman networks. And if, as Ingold (2022) pointed out, the sketched map does not contain borders, it simply does not contain them from the perspective that classifies them as separations; it does contain them, if we think of borders as the possibility of (co)inhabiting.

Right on the first pages of the chapter of Cartografia Sentimental [Sentimental Cartography], when seeking to produce a provisional definition of “cartography,” Suely Rolnik (2014) points out that a cartography refers to the relief of a contemporary landscape - a relief marked and produced by “voices reminiscent of the most diverse origins, harmonies and styles, mixing and composing themselves” (Rolnik, 2014, p. 24). The idea of relief seems interesting because a relief contains different textures, each of them produced by trajectories of different forces that, when together, form a unique landscape - without one of these textures, the relief would be another.

This perception of cartography as a sketch of a map that presents a landscape and its reliefs, whose borders are not divisions, but spaces of communication, offers us some important clues regarding the need for a conceptualization, even if provisional, of cartography as a policy for the production of knowledge, whose “products” are the result of collective and localized creation resulting from a clash of forces.

Such a clash of forces is always (in)formed from political, economic, historical, and social developments. When addressing knowledge production, we must consider the notion of political epistemology and how politics and science are articulated and distributed in relation and power networks. This implies saying that knowledge is not produced by moving away from politics, but rather located and embedded in politics.

The idea of localized knowledge is dear to cartography, even if it is not commonly expressed in these terms - historically linked to feminist epistemologies and, in particular, to Donna Haraway, who argues that “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims” (Haraway, 1995, p. 30). Likewise, the notion of border is at the center of feminist debates, as it speaks of the materiality and concreteness of social relations in tension with the fluid character of the borders that delimit them, and offers us, here, elements to think about the boundary relations between the elements that compose the reliefs of a cartography that has in the idea of border an analytical and methodological category that makes us see the ways in which borders are sometimes presented as barriers that engender difficulties, sometimes as habitable spaces through which it is possible to build, and to tension knowledge, practices, and relationships.

After all, when talking about (sketched) maps, reliefs and border spaces, we are talking about a geography - a geography that already appears in Deleuze and Guattari’s analyses when they define cartography as a much more geographical than historical device, in the sense that geography would make visible the different lines that compose the processes of subjectification, following their processes, and not in a historical-temporal linearity, showing the different regimes of visibility and tensions of force that produce such lines.

In this article, we propose some clues for thinking about a cartography in/of borders, one that seeks to understand the reliefs that are formed and unraveled in/from the borders of a given field. Here, understanding has less to do with explaining or demonstrating than with following movements. It is about identifying a possible, provisional geography that is outlined while being experienced and narrated in the context of research. It is a proposal to monitor a geography of affections, always embedded in other geographies, of power, knowledge, which are built not only in the face of events that engender barriers or borders, but also in these borders themselves. This this study aims to map cartography itself to think about how, in the fabric of a field, feminist epistemologies and methodologies allow cartography to question itself about its modes of operation, tools, and implications.

Here, we defend this border cartography as a feminist cartography, not only because it is based on the operationalization of the notions and tools of these epistemologies and methodologies, but essentially because it is defined as a research policy that starts from the concrete materiality of inequalities and violence against minority groups to think about the ways in which Science itself is part of the production of this violence, to invent and strengthen other forms of knowledge production. To think about the articulation between methodology and epistemology from a feminist perspective is to consider this articulation as a producer of ways of doing research, of ways of establishing relationships, and of a research ethic that considers the need, or even the urgency, of thinking about research policies that destabilize and denature hierarchical relations of knowledge-power, seeking to understand the political economy of knowledge production (Bhavnani, 1993).

The proposed reflections were produced in the context of a doctorate research conducted in prisons classified as female in Brazil and Portugal, but they are not restricted to the prison context. Based on a reflection on possible approximations between cartography and feminism, we advocate that a feminist approach in the cartographic ethos can enhance and radicalize the production of knowledge from the perspective of the philosophy of difference. For us, feminist cartography can offer important tools for political-methodological analyses in different contexts marked by inequalities and violence in which narratives and stories are woven and produced from an array of forces in which, whether in a concrete or virtual way, there is much at stake. We believe that such proposal is powerful for research that affirms its commitment to producing difference. And, to this end, it is essential to identify the forces that transform difference into inequality.

Encounters and Interviews: Repositioning the Cartography Toolbox Based on Feminism

When thinking about the knowledge production process, Gilles Deleuze (Foucault & Deleuze, 2021) argues that theories are a “toolbox,” requiring them to make the thought movements work for the multiplication of questions. Based on a position that intertwines theory and method, we seek to assemble new tools in the face of a feminist commitment to cartographic research, understanding that the tools that cartography offers us can be repositioned, reimagined, and mixed with other tools from other boxes. After all, “as theories are taken as toolboxes, concepts are always stretched, articulated with concepts from other fields, or even with empirical data, which can result in theoretical bricolage that possibly generates a kind of conceptual hybridity” (Hur, 2021, p. 289).

It is not a matter of discarding the cartographic tools present in the toolbox, but rather of transmuting them, transforming them into other kindred tools, capable of making visible the feminist commitments and choices that support the proposal of a feminist cartography interested in dismantling hierarchies of knowledge and power without, at the same time, ignoring them or foolishly believing that they can be overcome. On the contrary, they are tools that highlight them, that make visible the tensions that take place in the field - and that, ultimately, are built on the understanding that we always develop strategies in defense of life (Rolnik, 2014).

The interview is one of the tools that we intend to approach through feminist intensity. We understand the interview as a device with which one can intervene in the field and follow its movements. In cartography, the interview takes on specific contours, unlike methodologies that activate it as an objective technique from a positivist and scientific perspective. From this perspective, interviews can be understood as encounters, traced from a becoming, producing unique geographies. The notion of encounter here proposed concerns the interview as something always unpredictable, somewhat inserted in the order of chance. An encounter is a set of forces that produces geographies. Here, an interview is understood as the outline of possible encounters between the lines that compose the geography of the bodies inserted in it, which produce and are produced by the encounter - bodies that are not limited to individual human subjects, enclosed in themselves, but to an entire articulation between people, objects, social practices, power-knowledge relations, institutions, and technologies.

According to the readings of Deleuze and of Rosi Braidotti’s post-postmodern feminism (2005), we could say that an interview, as an encounter, has the task of producing an “alternative relational geography” that thinks as a starting point of “It produces an alternative relational geography, which assumes as the starting position the diasporic identity of multi-located subjects, and not a unitary subject position. Technology such as satellite surveillance and reconnaissance and border-patrolling video and electronic devices play a central role in Biemann’s embodied and embedded new geography of power relations” (Braidotti, 2005, p. 176). “Feminist theory tries to do justice to both complexity and instability as operational concepts in the constitution of social subjects” (Braidotti, 2005, p.178).

Silvia Tedesco et al. (2013) invite us to think about the cartographic ethos, which is not restricted to the interview, but is configured as an ethic that crosses the entire practice of the cartographer, considering that one of the cartographer’s art is to make the method vary, and not to vary in method. The cartographic management of the interview thus addressed requires understanding the interview as a shared experience whose performativity creates the world and allows access to the “collective plane of forces and its indeterminacy, the plurality of voices in the shared experience of saying” (Tedesco et al., 2013, p. 317).

Faced with the proposal to think about the interview based on a cartographic ethos, rather than a cartographic interview, we think of the notion of a feminist ethos in cartography, seeking to discuss how this cartographic ethos could also be imbued with the task of thinking about the asymmetries of gender, race, territory, nationality and class that cross the encounters produced in a research context. How can the cartographic method vary in view of the commitment to also follow the ways in which different categories of differentiation cross a field of research? What folding is it possible to operate in order to make the lines of cartography and the lines of feminist methodologies meet? As Céu Cavalcanti and Vanessa Sander (2019) point out regarding the dynamics of equality and differences, “the tension between singular and collective identifications becomes political as it is crossed by contingency and, as a paradox, we can think along with it that equality and difference are not opposing elements, but point to the complex management of inequalities” (p. 12).

What a cartography that operates (in) a feminist ethos seeks is to make visible the multiplicities that, moving away from the dichotomous separation between equality and difference, have in the analysis of possible, imagined and produced equalities and differences, the objective of identifying the ways in which inequalities cross not only the conditions of possibility of creating flows across borders, but also “the us’s which produce asymmetries and transform difference into inequality, identifying which forces and disputes configure conditions of possibility for being a subject” (D’Angelo et al., 2019, p. 9).

In the same way that the cartographic interview can be twisted by feminist intensity-strength in the face of the proposal to assemble unique tools for feminist cartography, we understand that other concept-tools dear to cartography can be transmuted to better serve and pave the way to affections woven in the context of a feminist cartography. We will dwell on them in the next sections.

Compositions for a Cartographic-Feminist Ethos: From Transversality to Feminist Objectivity

Hernández et al. (2017) articulate the proposal for a feminist cartography with that of “denaturalization,” understood by them as a methodological exercise of strangeness and suspicion as ethical and political attitudes in research. In this sense, we can say that the feminist cartography is not limited to its nature as a methodology, but is also and mainly a way of being in the world: an ethos. In the understanding of cartography as a posture, that is, as a way of being/seeing, as well as of the perception of relations as produced and inserted in a field of forces, there are many fringes that, on the borders between cartography and feminism, cross both sides of the lines that separate them, creating common spaces.

What does it mean to say that a feminist cartography based on research in social psychology has as its ethical and methodological concern the question of difference from a feminist perspective? Here, the concerns of the self-managed feminist group Eskalera Karakola (2004) seem urgent, which are to understand the ways in which particular oppressions work, how they connect with others, and to promote political articulations that guarantee continuous dialogue. Faced with these concerns, there are two pertinent points that cross the cartographic-feminist ethos: the political character of research, which, through this commitment, is understood as an integral part of a broader political process of articulation whose purpose is to break with processes that transform difference into inequality; and the relevance of theoretical and methodological efforts that seek to establish approximations between this first point and the notion of transversality proposed by Félix Guattari, with a view to cartographic research.

The notion of transversality (Guattari, 1981), which contributes to the overcoming of a dichotomy between verticality and horizontality, seems to be powerful for feminist cartography to the extent that both the vertical relationship between researchers and research-beings and the false horizontalization of this relationship through the invisibility of the differences that constitute conditions for the possibility of the existence of this relationship would have the same effect, namely, the erasure of differences and the subsequent maintenance of oppressions. Nevertheless, transversality seems to be a powerful tool for producing knowledge based on the tensions that the coexistence of differences, hierarchies and inequalities between researchers and research-beings, not supplanting them, but having them as the basis on which it is possible to produce knowledge.

Accordingly, María Lugones (2019) points to the role of decolonial feminists as fundamental to pointing out the colonial difference, which epistemologically tends to be erased. It is based on this task that the idea of a feminist cartography is designed: highlighting difference as a structuring element of relations, starting from difference to produce knowledge - which necessarily calls into question any perception of objectivity that supports the modern paradigm of science.

But this does not mean that making a feminist cartography has no objectivity, but rather that this objectivity is limited to criteria other than that of neutrality and reliability to a previously established reality. For a feminist cartography, mapping is recognizing differences as constituents of relations and as an element embedded in a fabric of knowledge-power, showing how the notion of neutrality makes invisible the hegemonic forces that erase hierarchies of power.

From this perspective, the objectivity of feminist cartographic research is anchored in two groups of elements: the first involves a perception of validation as something that occurs during the process, and which can be perceived through some questions such as whether the research is succeeding in capturing the movements that take place in the planes of force that compose the research field (Passos & Kastrup, 2013).

The second group of elements consists of identifying that the differences and the markers that approximate/distance subjects effectively objectify reality, considering that these markers always operate in such a way as to mark different living possibilities and relationships, according to the possible mobilities in the face of these marks. Ignoring them would somehow deobjectify reality, because there is nothing more objective than the confirmation that asymmetric relations of power and markers of difference materially cross bodies, lives, and relationships - as Fanon (2022) pointed out with regard to coloniality, when stating that the colonized individuals understand that objectivity is always directed against them. The notion of positioning also offers us some relevant clues: “our location is an objective feature of the world in which we live, the world as it is constituted precisely by various ‘positions’ of power and powerlessness. As such, our location is causally significant; it shapes ou experiences and our ways of knowing” (Mohanty, 1995, p. 110).

The term decolonize is of great relevance to the proposal of a feminist cartography, insofar as it invites a “the process of unlearning historically determined habits of privilege and privation, of ruling and dependency” (Mohanty, 1995, p. 110), a “un-acknowledgement” that actually amounts to the task of recognizing these habits, a definition that is very close to that proposed by Frantz Fanon (2022), who associates decolonization with the recognition of the historical moment that produced certain intelligibility.

It is worth considering that the location addressed by the post-colonialist proposal for the production of knowledge is not synonymous with the idea of a rigid methodological “relativism” that would seek to create distinct and irreconcilable spheres based on rules so diverse that they can only be tolerated or admired in their diversity, so that it is impossible for one to learn from the other or to displace one’s premises, beliefs, and points of view (Mohanty, 1995). The production of knowledge engaged in not reproducing colonial relations seeks to find points of contact where the coexistence of difference is possible. Perhaps this is what, after all, the notion of a common plane proposed by cartography is talking about: the ethical and methodological inclination to create spaces for the coexistence of differences, spaces in which these differences are not only sustained, but are also the starting point for the production of knowledge capable of showing the movements and the processability that produce the field of research. The common, in this sense, would be the space in which, starting from the confirmation that relativity is the condition of the possibility of knowing the world, so that it is shared and thus something that unites, it is possible to engage in the production of a knowledge that is localized, situated, and prone to dialogue.

Only by starting from these premises it is possible to produce critical knowledge that encompasses the complexity of the forces that produce relations in a research context, always putting into tension the risk of sometimes going over what the field and the people in the field say, sometimes romanticizing these narratives. It is in this sense that Haraway (1995) argues that feminist knowledge production seeks to “argue for a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (p. 24).

Regarding the idea of feminist objectivity proposed by Haraway, Kum-Kum Bhavnani (1993) affirms the historical and situational character of concepts such as “truth” and “objectivity.” For the author, recognizing the historical character of knowledge production implies asking some questions such as why certain topics take on importance and become objects of study in a given historical and social period: “an historical approach encourages questions to be raised about the political economy of knowledge production” (Bhavnani, 1993, p. 96).

Based on her reading of Haraway, Bhavnani (1993) questions if feminist research is correctly addressing the issue of the difference between women in their analyses, in the choice of their subjects, and in the structure of the texts that materialize research for society and for the scientific community. In her analysis, the author defines three pertinent elements for thinking about the objectivity of a feminist perspective: positioning, partiality, and accountability.

Based on each of these elements that she draws from Haraway’s analysis of localized knowledge, the author ponders about the ways in which it would be possible to define a research as feminist. Considering that it is not enough that the researcher and/or the interviewees are women, as well as highlighting the difference between the categories “woman” and “feminist,” Bhavnani lists some principles that would define research as starting from a feminist framework. Principles are not as rules enclosed in themselves, but rather a set of reflections on what could be called a feminist ethic in research.

The principle of accountability concerns the ways in which research portrays the field and the people who compose the problematic field: a feminist research seeks to portray what is the object of research in the opposite way to the dominant representations that engender inequalities: “the accountability of the research is not only to specific individuals, but also to the overall projects of feminisms” (Bhavnani, 1993, p. 98). According to the same author, when research is feminist and about people who are in hierarchically unfavorable positions, care must be taken not to keep them in the place of impotence, of those who lack agency or are abnormal. It is necessary to have this commitment.

She considers that “for feminist objectivity to be enhanced, and for knowledge production to be explicitly understood as an historical process, it is incumbent on women researchers to pose the above question of our/themselves, and to deal with it in the analysis” (Bhavnani, 1993, p. 98). Natália Padovani (2017) drew attention to the issue of “us” and “others” in an article that discusses whether the production of social sciences is possible without a critical analysis of categories and markers of difference. The author discusses “how geopolitics of knowledge have produced notions of ‘us’ and ‘them’” and how these are notions are “determinants of power relations and governmental practices that implement knowledge, war and market policies” (Padovani, 2017, p. 7). Also according to Padovani (2017), our analyses must be able to go beyond thinking about “equality” and “difference,” in the sense of recognizing and showing how asymmetries are constructed and how disputes are made present in knowledge and epistemology, delimiting “us” and “others” in generified, sexualized, and racialized bodies.

The principle of positioning concerns the commitment of research, which defines itself as feminist, to the events that take place in the micropolitical field of encounters: “what are the relationships of domination and subordination which the researcher has negotiated and what are the means through which they are discussed in the research report?” (Bhavnani, 1993, p. 98).

Finally, the principle of partiality points to the relevance of the issue of difference for studies defined as feminist. How can we question the difference, how is it triggered as a category of analysis from the design of the research problem to the production of the final text or even the dissemination of what was produced? How do we produce and think based on multiplicity?

As can be seen, the proposal for a feminist cartography suggests that there are important encounters between decolonial/de-colonial/post-colonial feminist methodologies and epistemologies and cartography, particularly with regard to the ethical concern to make research a way of being in the world based on the construction of common planes where differences can coexist, considering that only through an objectivity that places the produced knowledge it is possible to produce a critical and ethically committed knowledge.

In this study, we are addressing decoloniality, de-coloniality, and postcolonialism - different concepts that feminist epistemologies have mobilized. However, it is worth noting that, as Juan Vicente López Rodríguez (2018) points out, these terms are not neutral, they are in dispute and speak of theoretical approximations and distances that take place at the center of the relevant political-methodological clashes and debates, as well as affirming the commitment to making colonization and its effects visible (Dimenstein et al., 2020).

By dwelling on how these categories are constructed and mobilized based on epistemologies from the Global South, López Rodríguez (2018) indicates that each of these terms will shed light on different processes and issues, with convergences and divergences regarding the modes of knowledge production, the mechanisms and effects of the colonization process, and even in relation to what is understood as feminism. In this sense, the convergences between the decolonial, de-colonial, and post-colonial concepts point to processes under construction and assume the voices of non-white women as the main ones.

[…] There are also differences: for some, decoloniality is a much more urgent and profound process than decolonization; in some cases, “a feminism” is addressed, in others, feminisms; the decolonial is usually addressed from a singular perspective, while the de-colonial is plural; the post-colonial, for some authors, has an impossible chronological connotation, and for others it does not necessarily imply a historical moment. (López Rodríguez, 2018, p. 4).

In dialogue with the various contributions of feminist theorists regarding decoloniality, de-coloniality and postcolonialism, we understand here a perspective of decolonial feminism that considers the production of knowledge as something that is constantly open, under construction and attentive to the ways in which coloniality composes all of us in order to create strategies of resistance (Hollanda, 2020).

It is from this perspective of something in constant production with difference that we argue that the propositions derived from the philosophy of difference that constitute cartography greatly enhance the discussion of difference in the field of feminism, as well as feminism’s discussions about difference greatly contribute to expanding the reflections on the philosophy of difference.

Implication Analysis and Localized Knowledge: Compositions between Feminism and Institutional Analysis

As well as the notion of feminist objectivity repositions and radicalizes the proposal of transversality, we understand that another important element for research in social psychology that dialogues with cartography and institutional analysis can also be revisited based on feminist propositions. The question we intend to answer here is: how is it possible to bring the notion of implication analysis closer to the idea of localized knowledge (Haraway, 1995), in order to enhance the links that articulate cartographies and feminisms? Haraway (1995) had already drawn attention to how, in the discussion about knowledge production, methodology, epistemology, and politics are inextricable elements. That is why, for her, the task of producing feminist knowledge lies in situating the production of this knowledge, repositioning and redefining the notion of objectivity in science. For the author, feminism is related to sciences of multiple subjects that translate the world in an “interpretive, critical and partial” way (Haraway, 1995, p. 31).

What Haraway (1995) defines as “the knowledge of the subjugated” (p. 33) is of great interest to the production of knowledge in social psychology, which often focuses on contexts of violence, oppression, and inequality. Faced with the dynamics of power, and inserted in them, the researchers, while observing the reliefs of the cartography that is being drawn, create and modify them - and that is why the notion of “implication analysis,” from the Institutional Analysis, is so pertinent. Understanding the implication as an instrument of analysis and condition of research (Romagnoli, 2014), to the extent that all knowledge production is situated and circumscribed to unique situations and relationships, what this perspective proposes is that the implication analysis concerns research as a political intervention practice - and as an intervention policy, research becomes a field of dispute and negotiation between all the subjects involved, each one making it possible, through their relationships and their bodies, to produce certain reliefs. The concept of implication recognizes “institutional incidences, which also occur through affective means,” in such a way that “subjects expand the field of problematization, re-elaboration, transformation of their ways of being” (Dóbies, 2022, p. 216).

But talking about implication analysis does not mean talking about oneself, as if analyzing our implication were synonymous with bringing concerns about ethics and methodology in research to the field of subject and individuality. It is thinking about the following: how does my presence produce or make invisible certain events in the field, considering the elements of race, class, nationality, territory, language, gender, sexuality, and so on as elements that necessarily cross and structure my relations in/with the field? And in what ways is it possible to operationalize the crossings of these markers to produce knowledge?

What we seek here is to qualify this implication analysis, to insert it as the basis of the very idea of feminist cartography, based on the principles of accountability, partiality and positioning, as a theoretical and methodological policy that proposes “new possible geometries to consider relationships crossed and constituted by different differences” (Eskalera Karakola, 2004, p. 9).

It is a cartography that seeks to place itself within a certain “localization policy” (Eskalera Karakola, 2004, p. 17), which starts from the assumption that the production of knowledge is in constant dispute and tension with different regimes of truth production. Thus, it is necessary to assume itself and all perspectives as “partial, multiple, contradictory and critical” (Eskalera Karakola, 2004, p. 10). It is based on these assumptions that we outline the notion of feminist cartography as a position and research methodology that offers important clues to understanding the processes of relief formation in social psychology research.

From this perspective, mapping is expanding actions to encompass various processes and movements (D’Angelo et al., 2019). It is about constructing a geography that is provisionally presented as a “map of tensions and resonances” (Haraway, 1995, p. 29) inserted in a localized and, therefore, accountable epistemological and political reading.

The proposal of a feminist cartography seeks to explore and enhance the debate surrounding the production of knowledge in the field of social psychology, understanding that it is possible to compose arrangements and weave articulations between feminist and cartographic epistemologies and methodologies for formulating a research policy committed to the production of difference and to the unveiling of the processes that transform difference into inequality in different politically sensitive contexts in which violence and oppression constitute some of the sharp lines of production of subjectivity. Here, we seek to construct a feminist cartography capable of positioning research in social psychology in terms of localization and situationality and to produce connections that transform the modes of knowledge production in/from different fields of research.

Guided by the principles of accountability, partiality and positioning, the proposal of a feminist cartography is characterized by its radical commitment to difference, considering that this accountability speaks of a movement of continuity in which research is not enclosed in itself, to the extent that the relationships woven in the context of a research continue to involve us, in one way or another. In this sense, the challenging exercise of articulating concepts and tools from cartography to feminist propositions aimed to open possibilities for the construction of a research policy that recognizes its partiality and localization to think about its accountability - an accountability that places us in a direct relationship of involvement with the other and with the world and that, at the same time, calls us at a micro- and macropolitical level, as it speaks both of accountability toward the other and of accountability to transpose this implication to expanded movements to transform the world, or rather, to produce other worlds - more free, democratic, and diverse.

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• Article derived from the first author’s PhD thesis, under the supervision of the second author, defended in 2021 at the Graduate Program in Social Psychology from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Support: The study received financial support from FAPERJ - Carlos Chagas Filho Research Support Foundation in the state of Rio de Janeiro (process No. E-26/200.765/2019) and from the Internationalization Program (PrINT) of CAPES - Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (process No. 88887.368213/2019-00)

Edited by

Associate editor: Clarissa Mendonça Corradi-Webster

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  04 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  21 Mar 2023
• Reviewed
  27 June 2023
• Reviewed
  30 July 2023
• Reviewed
  17 Aug 2023
• Accepted
  18 Aug 2023