The tension between theory and practice, between knowing and doing, and between political philosophy and policy making is at the core of the intellectual debate among critical social scientists and political activists, generating questions of methodology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, and politics. By revealing the dialectic between gender and power within the theory-practice nexus to be constitutive of these problematics, feminist scholarship has transformed the disciplines it has engaged—at its most powerful fusing theory and practice into self-reflexive, theoretically informed praxis; in other words, a practice of theorizing that has a direct impact on the issues, subjects, and areas it studies. Transcending the binary between theory and practice through praxis has illuminated the need to understand activism as entailing theorizing, and scholarship itself as a form of political practice.
Since it was launched seven years ago, “Third Space” has deployed theory as a form of action—that is, praxis—and, by valuing the...
