Stories are data with Soul(1) - lessons from black(2) feminist epistemology

When asked to give the keynote address at the Annual Women in Research Lecture at the University of South Africa the author decided to change the topic from 'Women in Research' to 'Feminist Research'. Here she submits that researchers have much to learn from African feminist epistemology and research values, and draws attention to one particular defining feature of African feminist epistemology, namely 'narrative knowing'. She argues for the power of story as integral to qualitative research practice and at the very least as complementary to quantitative research practice. The benefits of STORY for researchers are that stories encourage and encompass: Suspicion of master narratives of knowledge; Tools of knowledge gathering and dissemination; Objection to objectivity; Reflexivity of the positioning of researchers; and Yearning for and working for transformation and change. Drawing on the works of Black feminist scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Obioma Nnaemeka, she discusses each of these benefits of narrative knowing for research and teaching in turn, by extracting and explicating the stories she has collected over the years as a researcher and a teacher. These stories provide a critique to conventional academic ways of knowing, particularly its claim to be science. This article concludes, in agreement with Brene Brown, that indeed 'stories are just data with soul'.