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Positionality and reflexivity have been key methodological strategies in feminist scholarship since the mid-1980s, foregrounding the unequal power geometries of knowledge production (Harding 1986; Haraway 1988; Mohanty 1988; England 1994; Kobayashi 1994; Nagar and Ali 2003; Peake 2016). In keeping with this long-standing feminist practice of recognizing that all knowledge is situated in particular places, we asked contributors to this volume to reflexively locate themselves in relation to their work by explicitly addressing their positionality. There was considerable variability to the ways in which authors responded to this invitation, reflecting the multiple geographies they were situated in, and multiple vectors of power that are mapped by the transnational research networks evoked in this volume. The contributors have highlighted that positionality is not a straightforward matter; scholars may occupy complex and multi-layered positions drawn from personal biographies of mobility, migration, or displacement, which cast them simultaneously as settler colonial subjects, as diasporic and transnational subjects, and as both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, with experiential or empathetic connections with their research sites and subjects (Santos Ocasio and Mullings, Chapter 2; Miraftab, Chapter 6; and Aruri, Chapter 8). However, as Indigenous and feminist scholars have argued, reflexivity is about political accountability to the people and places one is working with (Nagar 2002). Esson et al. (2017), for example, claim genuine decolonization requires the cultivation of critical consciousness to work in concert with activism. Several authors in this collection have situated their work in the context of participation in, and ongoing relationships with, activist communities and have illustrated how research processes are also constitutive of researchers’ subjectivities (Katsikana, Chapter 4; Angel, Chapter 5; Karunananthan, Chapter 7; Gillespie and Hardy, Chapter 11).

Accounting for positionality also requires an acknowledgement of the ways in which scholars are themselves imbricated in structures of coloniality and, thus, often ambiguously placed in relation to projects of decolonization (Dodson and Riley, Chapter 10). A decolonial agenda requires a confrontation with structures of white supremacy, privilege, and racism (Esson et al. 2017) and its connections with ongoing economies of extraction in unequal geographies of social reproduction. To this end, in Chapter 3, Emily Fedoruk’s hermeneutic approach causes her to reflect on her position as a ‘settler-reader’ of the quote from Indigenous Chief, Rhonda Larrabee, of the Qayqayt First Nation, part of a public art work ‘on unceded territories of Musqueam, Qayqayt, Tsleil-Waututh, Skxwú7mesh, Katzie, and Kwantlen Nations’ in New Westminster. Her reading is, as she puts it, ‘conditioned by my experiences as a white settler living for 25 years on Coast Salish territory’. She returns to this positionality at various points in her text to forestall a possessive reading of Larrabee’s text, to recognize that her reading of the text is itself tied to her own social reproduction as a knowledge producer in the academy, and to remind herself of the limitations of her own readings of Larrabee’s text or even of the Indigenous feminist scholars she cites in her chapter. Fedoruk’s analysis of her positionality reflects the ongoing ways in which academic research relationships, whether in urban studies or other fields, are immersed in the extractive logics that have historically structured the processes of racial capitalism and colonialism that continue to undergird economies of dispossession (Nagar 2008; Byrd et al. 2018). Furthermore, as Esson et al. (2017) have cogently argued, the deployment of discourses of decolonization within the academy is mired in a racial politics of gatekeeping and instrumentalization, wherein the use of decolonial language by non-Indigenous and white academics serves to reproduce coloniality by galvanizing the very structures of white supremacy that reinstate white privilege (see also Duarte and Belarede-Lewis 2015; Noxolo 2017; de Leeuw and Hunt 2018).

Feminist urban theory must be capable of critically engaging with these persistent historical and political realities if it is to avoid colluding with a politics of co-option, disempowerment, and reinstatement of racial (and particularly white) privilege and serve as a transformative tool for enacting decolonization. Reflexive analyses of positionality have gone some way in addressing these realities; as methodological strategies they underscore the need to remain continually vigilant to enduring erasures and new occlusions that might be constituted, even as the ethics and politics of research, representation, reflexivity, reciprocity, responsibility, and solidarity are being attended to in ever more nuanced ways through the work of scholars who elaborate feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional approaches to knowledge production and praxis (Faria and Mollett 2014, 2018; Daigle 2019; Nagar 2019).

The diverse research designs that contributors to this volume have deployed also highlight how they grapple with these methodological dilemmas of doing research as they seek to produce non-totalizing narratives of the urban. They fall into three (not mutually exclusive) clusters of: non-extractive praxis-oriented research; relational multi-sited research; and research based on a use of mixed methods.

The contributions by Katsikana (Chapter 4), Angel (Chapter 5), Karunanthan (Chapter 7), and Gillespie and Hardy (Chapter 11) favour ‘non-extractive’ collective feminist praxis to generate knowledge that can ‘resource’ struggles and be useful to movement actors. In pursuit of this goal, Angel navigates through the responsibility of his dual identity as a scholar and activist, and ultimately ‘resources’ the struggles he engages in by drawing upon his bilingual skills to translate movement literature and by seeking to build solidarity between activists located in the UK and Spain, such that these activist groups can reinforce and lend support to each other. For their part, Gillespie and Hardy elaborate a ‘dialogic collaboration’ method, which grants epistemic privilege to movement actors and deploys comparison to design research that, through ongoing dialogue, asks research questions that are relevant to movement actors, thereby ‘co/produc[ing] knowledges that “speak” the theoretical and political languages of communities’ (Ali and Nagar 2003, p. 365). Karunanathan, too, embodies a scholar activist praxis as she seeks to resource Solidaritas Perempuan Jakarta, by amplifying their local struggle to the international media, standing with them as an ally to highlight their role as knowledge producers. Finally, Mantha Katsikana (Chapter 4) addresses persistent contradictions and conflicts arising in Greek anti-authoritarian movements, spaces, and struggles in which she actively participated, directing the reader’s attention to the everyday praxis of the ‘personal is political’, especially as it shapes an urban commons that is all too often figured as implicitly, if not exclusively, masculine.

A further set of approaches, broadly encompassing comparative, relational and multi-sited, are at work in the chapters by Miraftab (Chapter 6), Muelle, Ojeda, and Fleischer (Chapter 9), and Gillespie and Hardy (Chapter 11). Such relational methods are important to knowledge production in urban studies; beginning from multiple places and tracing the relational trajectories of the evolution of places is to displace the epistemic primacy that has been given to the global North, while ‘rejecting any notion of pre-given “cases” or variants of a presumed universal/general process’ (Hart 2018, p. 373). In Chapter 11, Gillespie and Hardy embrace ‘dialogic collaboration’ to link and think through their participation in a sex worker union campaign in Córdoba and a single-mother housing campaign in London. They weave elements of feminist standpoint theory, social ontology, and activist/participatory methodologies together, both to reflect on their movement-centric and historically differentiated collaborations and to create explicit linkages and dialogues between and amongst contexts that might otherwise diverge under the weight of facile distinctions between global North and South. In Chapter 6, Miraftab’s relational approach introduces multiple temporal and spatial standpoints – as opposed to the single axis of a here-and-now approach that is common in social reproduction theories – to analyse the post-colonial racialized capitalist global hierarchies between the global South and North. Anchoring her research in the specific location of the US rustbelt city, Beardstown, Miraftab seeks to theorize the global restructuring of social reproduction through flows of migrants between Mexico and Togo. Similarly, Esguerre Muelle, Ojeda and Fleischer (Chapter 9) undertake a decade-long, relational multi-sited collaborative research project between South American and Spanish cities to delineate uneven geographies of care access and provision.

Unsurprisingly, and most commonly, a mix of traditional social science qualitative methods are employed by the contributors. In Chapter 8, Aruri deploys mixed methods in novel ways. In order to critically analyse the real estate development in the city of Ramallah she deploys such standard methods as semi-structured interviews, focus groups, discourse analysis of legal documents, and commentary on social media. But crucially, building upon her training as an architect, she combines these with a visual method that pays particular attention to the architectural and morphological elements of Ramallah. The value of this combination of methods not only enables her to demonstrate the importance of public space to social reproduction but also allows her to offer suggestions that have the potential to expand the imagination of Ramallite designers, planners, and spatial entrepreneurs to build ‘antispaces’ that reconfigure public space in such a way that new orders and modes of decolonial social reproduction can be achieved. In Chapter 4, Katsikana, draws upon interviews, participant observation, and content analysis as well as her own personal experience, in order to understand how the affective and collective labour of resistance within anti-authoritarian/anarchist movements contributes to social reproduction in Athens. While the contributors to this volume, like many other critical urban researchers, largely favour such qualitative methods, there are also those that employ quantitative methods; to produce partial, situated knowledges does not imply that qualitative methods are always privileged over quantitative methods, as methods themselves are not ipso facto feminist (Lawson 1995; Peake 2015). Dodson and Riley (Chapter 20), for example, deploy the data generated from quantitative surveys interpolated with those gathered from qualitative interviews to highlight the gendered nature of both the urban food system and urban food poverty in the three African cities where they work. By mixing quantitative and qualitative methods, Dodson and Riley point to the generative capacity of mixed methods feminist urban research.