Feminist cooperative inquiry: Grassroots women define and deepen empowerment through dialogue

Abstract

This paper is an account of feminist research influenced by Cooperative Inquiry (CI) described as Feminist Cooperative Inquiry. A team of grassroots women leaders-turned-co-researchers, from different marginalised social locations (on gender, caste, class, education, livelihood axes) in India, developed this methodology to collectively analyse their own empowering journeys to make meanings of empowerment. The diversity of co-researchers in this research led to making additions or deviations in the CI protocol. By bringing in nonliterate or low-literate women from marginalised groups as coresearchers, the research added political value by extending centre of collective knowledge building towards marginalised groups. The paper also discusses how the research processes further empowered the coresearchers for their own interpretations, abstractions and their selfdefined viewpoint in the domain of empowerment. Calling empowerment as primarily an ‘internal reflective process’ co-researchers defied oversimplified, quantifiable proxy indicators as any measure of empowerment.