1st Edition
Doing Feminist Research with Texts Thinking with Liz Stanley
Foreword
Sylvia Walby
Introduction: Liz Stanley and the Power of Texts: A Feminist Sociological Tribute
Órla Meadhbh Murray and Maria Tamboukou
Part I: Challenging Sociology
1. On Provocation
Rachel Thomson
2. How we feel: the Mass Observation Archive, Elias and doing sociology
Mary Holmes
Part II: Doing Feminist Research with Texts
3. Beyond the cookbook: Feminist research, personal narratives, and scholarly insights
Minna K. Ruokonen-Engler
4. A Stanleyian Toolkit Approach: Learning to Read and Write with Feminist Fractured Foundationalism
Órla Meadhbh Murray
Part III: Thinking Auto/Biographically
5. Wave~Diffractions. Revisiting the Untimely Academic Novellas in the Anthropocene
Mona B. Livholts
6. (Un)alienated Groundings: Feminist and Queer Revisions of Indian Personal Narratives
Arunima Theraja
7. Relating with past lives: cultural historian as a biographer
Maarit Leskelä-Kärki
Part IV: Reading and Rewriting Letters
8. The stroke of my pen: On transferring the past into the present
Erla Hulda Halldórsdóttir
9. Learning and Teaching about the Epistolarium in a Foreign Language Degree in Brazil: A Correspondence Between a Teacher, Her Two Students, and the Author They Read
Maria Rita Drumond Viana, Gabriela Zetehaku Araujo, Luciana dos Santos
10. Emergent properties in the letters of Nancy Nolan and Leonard Woolf: “…produce something good for yourself and possibly at some time good for other people…”
Anne Byrne
Part V: Problematising the Archive
11. Fan letter from a sociologist of secrets in the archive
Ashley Barnwell
12. Women mathematicians’ ‘epistolaria’: between the personal and the scientific
Maria Tamboukou
Afterword: Toward Feminist Textualities Yet to Come
Maria Tamboukou
Biography
Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/ they) is Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University, Fellow at Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities, and co- founder of the Institutional Ethnography Network. Their research addresses inequalities in higher education, sociology of the gut, and feminist knowledge production, primarily through institutional ethnography.
Maria Tamboukou is a scholar in Gender and Feminist Studies and has held professorial roles in the UK, Sweden, and Australia. Her work spans feminist epistemologies, narrative inquiry, and archival research. She has published widely, including her latest book, Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies (2025).
