Feminist Participant Observation of Postcommunist Politics: Objectivity, Activism, and Trying to Hit(Find?) a Moving Target.

This paper is part of a panel # 030982 entitled : Researching Women’s Movements and Gender Politic: Feminist Inquiry and Methodology in Empirical Research proposed by Jean C. Robinson Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been an explosion of in-depth studies of postsocialist societies crucial to broadening our understanding of postcommunist politics. While anthropologists have been contemplating feminist ethnography in the postsocialist states (e.g. Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist Societies, 2000), little has been written by political scientists. This paper, based on my struggles to do fieldwork in Russia, the Czech Republic, and Armenia, will examine the limits to objectivity, the paradoxes of activism, and the obstacles of trying to the hit the moving target that is postcommunist civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]