What complexities and reflections arise when surveying women, non-binary and trans people in public space? Our research intern Sarah Bretschko provides insights from her fieldwork for our FEMPUBLICBCN research project, which investigates the intersection of uses and perception of public space, gentrification, Covid-19 and health.
I arrive in the central Barcelona neighborhood of Sant Antoni at around 15:00, park my bike next to the recently renovated food market and make my way down of the area’s pedestrianized streets. The afternoon sun filters through the leaves of towering trees, providing shade for benches, cafés and bars that line the street all the way down to the Superilla—one of Barcelona’s car-free clusters of public space known in English as “superblocks” gradually being implemented across the city in a move to pacify streets. The centre of the superblock, formerly a noisy traffic intersection, is now a semi-green space where parents take their kids to play after school, skaters showcase their tricks and tourists marvel at Barcelona’s critically acclaimed urban policy. I’m there to gather feedback from residents for our project FEMPUBLICBCN, which studies the uses and perception of public space, gentrification, Covid-19 and health.
I quickly scan the Superilla: a mother with two kids who I see almost every day (who I have already interviewed in the past week), a group of older people having a chat, two men on separate benches smoking a cigarette, and a male pétanque group heading towards the park. That most often those spending idle time in public tend to be men (or male-presenting) has been one of the first observations in our fieldwork for FEMPUBLICBCN.
Applying a feminist intersectional lens, FEMPUBLICBCN investigates how the uses and perceptions of public green space have changed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, gentrification and touristification, and the impacts of this on the health of women, non-binary and trans people. The quantitative data collection is based on street intercept surveys in Sant Antoni and La Barceloneta—two neighborhoods heavily impacted by gentrification (Sant Antoni) and touristification (La Barceloneta).
A major observation concerns patterns regarding who uses public space in the targeted neighborhoods, and what it is used for. According to our observations, many more male-presenting people tend to use the observed public spaces for relaxing and passing time. In contrast, female-presenting persons tend to carry out some sort of care work: dropping off or picking up kids from school, caring for the elderly, walking the dog, or running errands. In fact, this largely determined our surveying schedule, making the hours just before or after school the best time to find women available to interview. Of course, the fact that it is mostly women carrying out this sort of task points to the highly gendered nature of care work, and the dynamics this creates in public space.
An additional consideration regards the positionality of fieldworkers in public spaces, especially in heavily touristified and gentrified cities like Barcelona. For example, gaining the trust of older female participants was more difficult due to their previous experiences with robbery and scams. This lack of trust intensified when those of us approaching them were not local to Barcelona and did not speak Spanish or Catalan as a first language.
As fieldworkers we also took note of the complexities around who we assume to be women, non-binary or trans people. When doing street intercept surveys with a limited target group, you assume certain characteristics before approaching people, to make sampling more targeted and less time-consuming. For example, say your target group was people above 60 years old; normally you would not ask people whether they are above 60 if they look significantly younger. When you do the same for gender, things get tricky. Gender is not a fixed category, but a dynamic social construct; and yet, when doing street intercept surveys, we assume someone’s gender primarily on how they look.
In most cases, we are accurate guessing a cis-woman’s gender by her female presentation, but what about gender-nonconforming people, trans-men, trans-women and everyone who does not obviously present as either a man or a woman? How do we make sure to include them in our sample, and how can we approach non-cis gender people in a sensitive way in public space? At the end of the day, we have to make sure they fall into the right target group, so how do we not make the primary interaction about potentially mis-gendering them? These are some of the questions to grapple with when planning an intersectional project that includes survey research. As fieldworkers, we also had to critically reflect on our own perceptions of gender. In our experience, recruiting non-binary and trans participants has been a challenge, which says something about their underrepresentation in public space, or at least about different patterns in their use of public space.
Considering BCNUEJ’s stance on the ethics of care in academia, and our respective feminist- intersectional backgrounds, FEMPUBLICBCN has proved an insightful laboratory for how to strive towards horizontality, mutual support and care within a research team. Transparent communication, making time to share both motivational and frustrating moments, and integrating wider reflections on the project made me feel part of a knowledge co-creation process rather than a cogwheel in a machine for knowledge production. While we succeeded in fostering caring and supportive relationships within the research team, constraints within a profit-driven, neoliberal academic context made it hard to fully implement a feminist ethic. For example, due to the financial structure of the project, various fieldworkers were employed as interns with limited pay, or had to self-organize insurance due to precarious contracts. This in turn influenced the time and motivation each of us had available for the project.
Despite the challenges, I remind myself that reflecting on these complexities is key to pushing gender-inclusive practices in methods like survey research; and having a supportive research team is a first step in the right direction.
