Feminist social research, sociology and social epistemology: how to develop shared theoretical and discursive space?
Seppo Poutanen
The first part of this research project will examine the relationships between feminist social research, social theory and sociology in the key contemporary theoretical literature by using specific and detailed analytical frameworks (a constructed ideal type of feminist social research and Hall?s theory of formative discourses). The aim is to give a well-grounded picture of how contemporary feminism and sociology are interrelated in their continuities and discontinuities. This is a central metasociological research question internationally, but so far it has been lacking detailed analyses from the kind of perspective I outline in my proposal. The results of the project will contribute to further development of feminist social science and sociology as theoretical fields of research. The results will also give basis for the second part of the project, in which the focus shifts to the relationship between social theory and social epistemology. The second part builds upon and develops further my previous research on social epistemology (Poutanen 2001, 2003), and relates it to international research collaboration with European and US colleagues. The general result of the first part of this project will be a multidimensional and integrated (both feminist theory and sociological theory incorporated) conception of the discursive space called social theory, and this conception will be used to develop social epistemology in the second part of the project. One key idea here is that, as soon as an epistemologist takes the ?social? seriously, she cannot escape essential questions of social theory such as the structure/agency problem, for example. Therefore, comprehensive knowledge of social theory is necessary for developing social epistemology. The main research methods will consist of theoretically grounded discourse analysis and other forms of conceptual and textual analysis, which will fulfill the general requirements of consistency and inclusiveness. Funding: the Academy of Finland; Funding period: 2005 ? 2008.