ABSTRACT
This chapter turns now to feminist efforts to empower through empirical research designs which maximize a dialogic, dialectically educative encounter between researcher and researched so that both become, in the words of feminist poet-singer, Cris Williamson, "the changer and the changed". The overt ideological goal of feminist research in the human sciences is to correct both the invisibility and distortion of female experience in ways relevant to ending women's unequal social position. This entails the substantive task of making gender a fundamental category for our understanding of the social order, "to see the world from women's place in it". Mies field-tested seven methodological guidelines for doing feminist research in an action research project in Cologne, Germany, designed to respond to violence against women in the family. The methodological self-reflections of Acker et al. are especially provocative as they wrestle with issues of false consciousness versus researcher imposition.
