Compare methods

	Feminist Participatory Action Research	Feminist Standpoint Analysis
Field	Gender Studies	Gender Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	1983
Originator	Patricia Maguire; Colleen Reid and Wendy Frisby	Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, Sandra Harding
Type	Participatory, emancipatory feminist research methodology	Critical feminist epistemology and analytic framework
Seminal source	Reid, C., & Frisby, W. (2008). Continuing the journey: Articulating dimensions of feminist participatory action research (FPAR). In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Action Research (2nd ed., pp. 93–105). SAGE, London. ISBN: 9781412920308	Harding, S. (1991). Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. ISBN: 9780801497469
Aliases	FPAR, Feminist PAR	Standpoint Theory, Feminist Standpoint Epistemology, Standpoint Methodology
Related	4	4
Summary	Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) fuses the participatory action research tradition — in which communities investigate their own conditions through cycles of action and reflection — with feminist commitments to analyzing gender power, foregrounding marginalized women's knowledge, practicing reflexivity, and producing concrete social change. Pioneered by Patricia Maguire in 1987 and later systematized by Colleen Reid and Wendy Frisby, it dissolves the usual divide between researcher and researched, positioning community members as co-researchers who shape the questions, the process, and the outcomes.	Feminist standpoint analysis is a critical epistemology and analytic strategy holding that all knowledge is socially situated, and that beginning inquiry from the everyday lives of marginalized people — historically women — yields a more complete and less distorted account of social reality than the supposedly neutral view from dominant positions. Developed by Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, and Sandra Harding in the 1980s, it argues that the marginalized see both the dominant order and its underside, and that this doubled vision, when methodically developed into an achieved standpoint, can ground a 'strong objectivity' superior to claims of value-free detachment.