One of the central contributions of feminist researchers has been to make research more accessible to people and bridge the distance between the researched and the researcher. The fieldworker?s relationship to thepeople has been a much discussed topic in anthropological work but still had the hangover of positivist social science (Srinivas et al. 1979). However, the centrality of gender and the standpoints of women were still ignored and invisible. Thus, feminist theory and feminist movements inspire and guide the methods used by feminist scholars. Most feminist scholars advocate an inter-disciplinary approach to knowledge whichgrounds theory in women's everyday contexts Androcentric disciplines are refashioned to not just accommodate all concerns of marginality and subjugation but reinvent them.The definitions of work and economy and caste discrimination cannot be studied without a feminist lens and research questions can be tailored to understand complex intersections between class, caste, race, religion and gender. The methods of sociological research need not be dumped, but reconfigured to suit the demands of contemporary social realities. Gender concerns need not be outside and added to the research problem but arealready central to it. To state the obvious, feminist research works at bringing the margin to the centre in a holistic manner. The early positivistic preoccupation with the need to provide a science of society has been replaced by a consciousness of understanding society from the point of view of the researched. By tracing the links in feminist research and reflecting on my own understanding of those that I have worked with, I find that the sociological journey has been quite transformative. I think that with more men doing feminist work and the breaking down of gender binaries, the future for feminist research is rather exciting.

Dr. Aparna Rayaprol is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad and was the Director of the Study in India Program from 2009-14.Her areas of academic interest include gender studies, Indian diaspora, qualitative research methods and urban sociology. Earlier, she was an Associate Professor in Research Methodology at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai. She was a faculty on the Semester at Sea Fall 2003 Voyage which went around the world (10 countries) teaching courses in sociology. Her PhD was from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research onsecond generation Indian-Americans was funded initially by an ICSSR grant on Indian diaspora and Princeton University at the Center for the Study of American Religion in 1998-99. She continues to work in the area ofdiaspora and gender as well as globalization and gender in the Indian context. She is the author of Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997.She has been with Study in India Program (SIP) at the University of Hyderabad since its inception in 1998 and has been closely involved with its academic as well as administrative responsibilities. She has been conceptualizing and teaching n ew courses for SIP and coordinating the academic activities between teachers and students as well as reciprocal institutions. She has also been involved in helping other Indian Universities develop such initiatives for foreign students.