Academic Pathfinders: Knowledge Creation and Feminist Scholarship (review)

It is hard to argue that feminist scholarship has been anything but a huge success story. As Patricia Gumport argues in Academic Pathfinders, despite recent critiques of feminist scholarship and disagreements within the field,"feminist scholarship . . . has generated a degree of intellectual disruption, interpersonal conflict, and curricular transformation" (p. 154) that other area studies programs have yet to achieve.

The central theme of Academic Pathfinders is that the creation of new knowledge is a product of biography, disciplinary norms and structures, organizational conditions, and historical circumstances. To show how new knowledge areas develop and become legitimized, Gumport explores the rise of feminist scholarship through the experiences of the women she labels the "Pathfinders." Pathfinders began graduate school in the mid-1960s and were active scholars in the 1970s and early 1980s. She draws on in-depth interviews with 35 Pathfinders to show how feminist scholarship took different paths in three disciplines: history, sociology, and philosophy. She also discusses new options Pathfinders created for both the Forerunners, those women in the academy when the Pathfinders became graduate students, and the Pathtakers, those who followed the Pathfinders in graduate school. The options included following or not the agenda started by the Pathfinders.

The conceptual approach Gumport develops in Chapter 1, although based on somewhat dated literature from the 70s and early 80s, is a strength of the book. Drawing on organizational theory, sociology of culture, and sociology of science, Gumport forges an analytic perspective that "emphasizes that the relationship between emerging knowledge and its respective historical conditions is mediated by individuals' life experiences and by the prevailing practices within established institutional settings" (p. 2). Simply put, knowledge creation involves much more than idea work alone.

This analytic perspective is played out in Chapter 4, where Gumport lays out the more general conditions that fostered "breakthroughs" for emerging feminist scholars. These conditions, such as a critical mass of women scholars, financial aid, disciplinary openings, and supportive conditions on campus, allowed women to translate their political concerns into scholarly work. However, it is through the specific focus on knowledge development in the disciplines of history, sociology, and philosophy in Chapter 5 that the reader most clearly sees how biography, history, discipline, and organization interact to produce different forms of new knowledge. For example, in the case of history, women's history coincided with the emergence of the new field of social history and became accepted as a sub-field within the discipline. Although facing some obstacles, pathfinder historians found it relatively easy to find relevant historical questions that contributed to content knowledge within their field. Because gender was already an accepted analytical concept in sociology, the sociologist pathfinders, aided by critical theory and leftist critiques, made their contributions by reconceptualizing theory in an attempt to explain gender-based inequalities but not by fundamentally changing the discipline or creating specific sub-field as in history. According to Gumport's analysis, the very basic premises of philosophy—universalism, the pursuit of truth through abstract reasoning, and the primacy of analytic philosophy with its emphasis on detached inquiry—have made it more difficult for feminists to define research questions deemed legitimate. As a result, "There were neither natural intellectual openings nor rewards for challenging the dominant adversarial method" (p. 130). Pathfinder philosophers faced the choice of working in traditional philosophy, challenging the method of the discipline or working outside it.

In the concluding chapter, Gumport extends the discussion to focus on how the conditions for knowledge creation in general are changing. These include the political environment external and internal to a field, the changing organizational conditions within universities, and changes in the organization of academic knowledge. For example, she argues that "an unprecedented blending of fiscal and academic interests has reshaped the academic landscape of universities and changed the conditions in which faculty and graduate students engage in knowledge work" (p. 158...