Teaching reflexivity: Undoing or reinscribing habits of gender?

Abstract

This paper outlines an approach used in a course designed to teach reflexivity as a research skill and explores what kind of gender intervention such teaching might constitute. Although inspired by feminist debates about the complex power dynamics of research relationships, the course in question does not focus specifically on gender issues. Instead it draws attention to the complex, diverse and subtle negotiations that take place within research encounters, and explores how these might be analysed. Reflecting on this teaching, I suggest that it is double-edged, helping to unsettle or undo normative assumptions about gender but also contributing to processes of feminization in research practice through which habits of gender are reinscribed. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.