Questioning Collaboration in Feminist Research: A Women and Poverty Research Model Reconsidered‪.‬

Introduction Psychologist Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, suggested in Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (1996) that there are only three questions worth asking--What? So What? and What's next? These deceptively simple questions provide the framework for the three sections that comprise this essay. The first section initiates a conversation of thoughts about collaboration and charts my experiences with and investments in feminist research methodology that is collaborative in spirit and intent. The subsequent section underscores the tango of tension and play of power that characterize collaborative processes by analyzing a collaborative feminist research project that paired eight women's studies professors at University of Wisconsin university campuses with community women who lived in poverty to conduct a longitudinal, in-depth interview research study documenting the early effects of welfare reforms initiated in the mid-1990s. The concluding section invites continued conversations about collaboration as a beneficial, though problematic, component of feminist methodology and calls for a commitment to place questions about power imbalances at the center of these conversation.