MARG: toward an antiauthoritarian profeminist media research methodology

Sandra Jeppesen, Toni Hounslow, Sharmeen Khan and Kamilla Petrick | 2017 | article in Feminist Media Studies

In this article we map a taxonomy of activist-research, illustrating how MARG brings together five specific methodologies— activist-led issue-based research, militant participatory ethnography, feminist community research, prefigurative antiauthoritarian feminist participatory action research (PAFPAR), and autonomous media research—to study how women, people of colour, queer and trans people, and Indigenous people in antiauthoritarian or anarchistleaning social movements are using grassroots media to support and report on these movements.

We find that although MARG set out to create an antiauthoritarian research-activist collective, we are restricted in some ways by the intensification of neoliberalism in the university institution. Nonetheless we are able to conduct transgressive research at the intersection between antiauthoritarian activism and the academy, producing three direct and immediate impacts: within social movements, within media activism, and within the university.