ABSTRACT
What are the historical sites of the realities with which this book engages and of which it forms part? This chapter aims to introduce and situate the development of women’s consciousness and research activism in the country due to its importance for an understanding of Sri Lankan feminist research methodology. To do so I will subscribe to the discursive methodology1 of archaeology (as conceptualised by Foucault 1972). This will include a brief, descriptive and subjective historical trajectory of the country’s socio-political developments, a profiling of researchers and an engagement with the ground politics and economics of women’s studies research and writing. It will also include a discursive sketch / construction of women’s knowledge from before and after 1975, and some of the macro-and micro-politics relating to knowledge production.
