Abstract

In collaborative research practice, we often focus on how our ideas and actions align (or not) with those who we research and practice with. An important aspect of any collaboration is the complex nature of intersubjective interaction that takes place between people from different backgrounds, experiences, socio-economic positionalities, and skillsets. As researchers/practitioners, we often live and work between the spectrum of “insider-outsider” in relation to the communities we work with. We often also struggle to name the relationship we share with the people and communities we work with. Collaborative research and practice, especially Feminist methodologies have urged us to step out of the standard binary of expert/researcher-subject/informant. It has helped redefine this participatory interaction as contingent-emergent roles between co-researchers, co-designers, and co-learners in the process of collaborative research practice. In our experience of collaborative engagement with the communities we are working with, we wish to explore further the nature of these interactions in a way that pushes the limits of these roles further to rethink the complexity of long-term relationships we have come to build over the years. Our experiences go way beyond our research/practice/work. They define who we are, what we are becoming, and how we are learning to survive well together. In that sense, the communities we work with are not mere co-travellers, co-researchers or co-designers. They are friends, carers, companions, allies and lovers.

In this session, we wish to explore the complexities of these attachments, shared vulnerabilities and possible relationships that come to inform what we do and how. Our knowing, being and relating is hence an enmeshed process that we live and learn in/with collaborations. The questions we wish to explore in this session are:

• how do we ethically negotiate the relationships we encounter in the field?

• how do we innovate methods and collaborative processes premised up on feminist care, responsibility, ethics and love?

Presenters

1. Alison Guzman

2. Bhavya Chitranshi

3. Anisah Madden