How do we know? Methodological and ethical challenges of scientific inquiry into attacks against gender studies in Romania

Anti-gender campaigns have intensified in Romania over the years, reaching a new peak in 2020 with an initiative to ban not only gender studies, but also any form of education that differentiated between sex and gender (Băluță O. 2020, Băluță I. 2020). The attacks on academic programs and gender scholars put pressure on academic freedom, critical inquiry (Butler 2022) and reveal a coordinated effort to exercise control over the production of knowledge (Paternotte, Verloo 2021). The argument of this paper is academic inquiry into attacks against gender studies pose significant methodological and ethical challenges. Women’s and gender studies have long time struggled with the tension between theorizing and action (Ferree, Sperling, Risman 2005, Băluță 2021). Attacks against gender studies introduce additional challenges. The authors of this paper are gender scholars whose work has been subjected to attacks due to purported weak scientific grounding and intersection with activism. The authors were leading resistance actors against the attempt to ban gender studies and mobilized national and international networks of solidarity. We consider that feminist standpoint epistemology strengthens academic inquiry into attacks against gender studies given its emphasis on situated knowledge and partial perspective (Harraway 1988; Harding 1986, 1992). However, it poses methodological challenges that raise inherent ethical questions. As such, we seek to address the following interrelated research questions: How do we analyze attacks that are ethically incongruent with values embraced both as researchers and activists? How do we conceptualize researcher’s positionality when attacks nominally target the authors? How can we integrate our own experiences in the production of knowledge on opposition against gender studies in Romania? Anti-gender campaigns and the far right continuum have become an expanding scientific field (Norocel 2023/2024). Academic inquiry into attacks against gender studies and far right reveal strong imbrication between research methodology and ethics, related to the process of data collecting and analysis (Toscano 2019, Graff, Korolczuk 2021). The above mentioned ‘double belonging’ makes almost impossible fieldwork and qualitative interviews with actors that have voiced opposition against gender studies and scholars (the authors are included). Collecting digital data is a methodological choice, nevertheless has inherent shortcomings, such as the fragile equilibrium between technology and social understanding (Bolsover, Howard 2017, 273- 274). Wodak highlights discursive transformations of “usual” language, normalization of the language of crisis, fear and racism in the far right universe (Wodak 2015, 2020). Therefore, research of anti-gender campaigns poses ethical challenges to avoid publishing and reproducing hate speech frames and stereotypical discourses. Both analysis and collecting digital data generates heated debates over spaces and what kind of data should be considered public or private (Tiidenberg 2018). Also, we need to reflect on methodological opportunities to integrate our own experiences and information from contexts situated at the crossroads of public and private spaces. Last, but not least, these attacks reveal symbolic and epistemic violence, hence we need to substantially reflect on how research topics impact scholars, both their safety and professional security (Pető, 2018; Ergas, Kochkorova, Pető, Trujillo 2022, Bouvart, Proost, Norocel 2019; Butler 2022).