ABSTRACT
Feminisms have played a critical role in higher education research, principally by (re)centering cisgender women’s experiences in the academy, as well as offering diverse critical paradigms for the ongoing project of achieving gender equity in post-secondary education. Liberal feminist (e.g., Glazer-Raymo, 2008a; Glazer, Bensimon, & Townsend, 2000), critical feminist (Eddy, Ward, & Khwaja, 2017; Ropers-Huilman, 2003) and black feminist (Alexander-Floyd, 2010; Arya, 2012; Collins, 1986; Croom & Patton, 2011) conceptualizations of feminism in higher education are examined in this chapter. I explore how these feminisms have been defined and deployed in higher education research, what questions have surfaced as the ‘proper’ and prioritized domain of feminist analysis, and why. Additionally, I discuss the methods most commonly deployed in feminist post-secondary research and how they have revealed new questions, new ways of being/thinking, and most importantly, new enactments of liberatory praxis in post-secondary education. I analyze how feminisms function to advance critical questions of liberatory praxis in the contemporary academy, focusing on insights gleaned from my own practice. I conclude the chapter by proposing the use of Nicolazzo’s (2017) trans* epistemology to further realize the feminist potentiality for deeper and more consciously critical transformative epistemologies in higher education research.
