Situated Knowledge in Motion: Reconsidering Urban Feminist Methodologies

Grounded in the epistemological frameworks of situated knowledge (Haraway 2013. Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In: Women, science, and technology, 3rd ed. Routledge) and situated intersectionality (Yuval-Davis 2015. The politics of belonging: intersectionality, citizenship and feminist politics. SAGE Publications, London), this paper examines the promises and frictions of feminist participatory research in urban contexts. Drawing on two empirical projects in Milan and Bologna, it interrogates the gap between feminist epistemological commitments and the structural, temporal, and emotional constraints encountered in fieldwork with marginalized women. While participatory and creative methods offer context-sensitive tools to co-produce spatial knowledge, they often confront institutional timelines, unequal capacities to engage, and asymmetrical power relations. Through an analysis of empirical encounters, the paper explores how care, reflexivity, and relational ethics are operationalized under imperfect conditions, and how tensions around representation, inclusion, and positionality shape the research process. Rather than viewing these contradictions as methodological shortcomings, the paper conceptualizes them as generative sites of situated knowledge in motion: a feminist methodological orientation that embraces contingency, acknowledges ambivalence, and sustains epistemic accountability. By advancing a non-idealized understanding of participation as partial, affective, and contingent, the paper contributes to feminist methodological debates on how urban research can remain ethically attuned, politically engaged, and relationally transformative.