Abstract
“Do not monopolize your knowledge nor impose arrogantly your techniques, but respect and combine your skills with the knowledge of the researched or grassroots communities, taking them as full partners and co-researchers. Do not trust elitist versions of history and science which respond to dominant interests, but be receptive to counter-narratives and try to recapture them. Do not depend solely on your culture to interpret facts, but recover local values, traits, beliefs, and arts for action by and with the research organizations. Do not impose your own ponderous scientific style for communicating results, but diffuse and share what you have learned together with the people, in a manner that is wholly understandable and even literary and pleasant, for science should not be necessarily a mystery nor a monopoly of experts and intellectuals” (Borda, 1995).
In 1995, Fals Borda asked academics to consider their engagement with research in its entirety. Walking through each step of the process, he underscored that research cannot be bookended with good intentions, but that researchers need to consider and engage intentionally with liberatory approaches if their work is to authentically further a social justice agenda. His words reflected the then emerging move to democratize science and ensure its relevance to society and the furthering of social justice. These developments were seen particularly within qualitative research frameworks. Such encouragement has gone a long way to supporting research that is community-centered and considered far more ethical. We’ve seen a marked increase in the use of relational ethical practice, community ownership of research focus, and subsequent data gathering and findings. Collectively, these approaches have helped to ensure greater appropriateness of research methods used in field work, increased attention to knowledge translation and mobilization, and improved dissemination of findings.
As attention and engagement in these various areas of research grow, we see substantial progress emanating across the research terrain. Despite these gains, we as researchers should be cautious of what Kovach (2018) calls “the banality of academic habit” (p. 214): complacency in our work and a lack of ongoing critical reflection of our practice, resulting in noncritical work at best and oppressive work at worst. Without this consideration, our research practice can serve to undermine both the advances made in the broader field of critical research and the intended impact of our own outputs. In short, we need to ensure we continue to find ways of democratizing science and producing research findings that promote positive changes in society.
Our discussion in this editorial emerges from our own collaboration and the ways in which specifically our writing projects have highlighted a taken-for-granted use of terms in setting out the contexts of communities. Two years ago, we were writing on a chapter about participatory research ethics when working with Indigenous youth. During the writing process, and in response to Linda’s opening sentence “The past few decades have seen a growing movement to rethink the way we approach and conduct research with marginalised populations,” Michele posted the following comment: I don’t know why this word [marginalised] bothers me. Continuing to use marginalization when describing a current population only predicates further social exclusion. To me, this word defines keeping someone or a group in a powerless or unimportant position within a society or group. Even the word “disenfranchised” is difficult…. I don’t know how to make it less top down…. it is about sharing information, practices and beliefs to ensure that research is shaped in a way that is respectful and encompassing of Indigenous knowledge and gives back information/data that can be used by the Indigenous partners themselves as well as for their academic partners.
These various exchanges prompted a conversation about the attention academics give to the meaning of words and the resulting implications when words are integrated into particular phrases. Our reflection has prompted questions such as “Who does our use of language continue to privilege? Silence? And marginalize?”; “Where do we situate responsibility for the challenges that people are dealing with, all the while having not created?” and “In what ways does our writing continue to exclude communities from accessing academic publications?” Fundamentally, we question whether we are thinking enough about what the words and the phrases we use mean in the ways we write academically? Or have we slipped into that “banality” (Kovach, 2018) where we uncritically include terms such as “marginalized” and “disenfranchised” in our well-intended written academic outputs.
Many researchers now work in ways that focus on partnerships, questioning what our relationships look like in the research field, the theoretical approaches that inform our work, and how these various components impact research outcomes, and in turn the quality of life of those with whom we work. However, if we start to think specifically about how we write about our findings, do we as researchers unintentionally trivialize how we discuss context? Is this because we are trained to respond to a “problem” through our research? How are we as researchers thinking about the research problem (i.e., the research question) in relation to real-life and/or lived problems? How is this shaped by prior academic needs to obtain funding and to “grab the reviewer’s attention” with the magnitude of the problem for example? Similarly, how do we simplify the way we write about contexts in our publications because of practical issues like word counts without considering the ways in which these approaches further entrench the challenges communities are facing?
When responding to Michele’s comments, Linda was challenged by how to write about a situation that is chronically unfair, where the macro context has and continues to marginalize particular groups within society. How do we ensure that the reality of this larger context does not get lost, is not ignored or minimized, but simultaneously is not situated in ways that further undermine the communities who are confronted by the problem, and who are left to find ways of thriving despite marginalizing macrostructures. Put differently, while many communities are confronted by systemic structures that oppress, marginalize, and disenfranchise, these structures are not rooted in communities themselves but elsewhere. So, how do we write in ways that are sufficiently balanced and nuanced so as to ensure that the people we work with are not defined by the problems others have created but rather are able to effectively foreground their strengths and resources?
We wonder whether the roots of this language-use problem are situated in the Western measurement frameworks that we use; the ways in which we assess what counts as knowledge? Does this way of looking at academic language, looking at data, and the findings they translate into, impact the words and phrases we automatically use to describe contexts and the ways in which they in turn, impact outcomes? Despite the very real challenges that communities are facing, finding a way of using language to describe these challenges without becoming alarmist or sensational is really important if we are going to further our work and our intent to be respectful. In response, we propose that writing be more firmly grounded in the recipient. When it comes to Indigenous research, Michele challenges all her academic partners to read reports and articles as if they were reading about their own world. Here, a well-developed sense of social construct is important: understanding our own subjectivity and how it is positioned within larger social organization and power (Richardson & Adams St Pierre, 2018). Academic focus on theoretical analysis and interpretation of findings provides an example. This can be done in a very flat or mechanistic way without considering how this interaction with data impacts the ways in which findings are disseminated (see also Kovach, 2018). More importantly, some researchers may not think of how the ways in which the findings themselves are written will affect a community.
While movements such as post-structuralism have freed qualitative researchers from a predetermined approach to so-called scientific writing (Richardson & Adams St Pierre, 2018), this freedom also compels us to be more responsible in our writing and in the minutia of how we use our language. As Michele has remarked, Especially when working with small communities—like we have in our region—I always challenge people, if you had to hear about some of the difficulties that you had to deal with in your world, how would you prefer to hear about that? How can you describe challenges in ways that retain a strengths-based approach, how are you are showing the challenges—because the challenges are there and we need to be honest about that—but doing it in ways that are sensitive to that community? The last thing we want is for people in communities to only look at the negative of their lives and their experiences.
From an academic standpoint, and for publication purposes, academic writing can sensationalize the research context, to underscore the importance of the work. Writing is often shaped with the audience in mind. Academic audiences include funders and reviewers of manuscripts. And seldom is the actual community that the researcher is supposed to be in partnership with, considered as part of that audience. If we reflect on Indigenous research methods and related research ethics, it is clear that it is no longer about being researched (Kovach, 2018; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Wilson, 2008), it is about being a part of a team exploring an issue that is a concern for the community. The intent then becomes to give the information back in a way that will allow the community to not only better understand the complexities surrounding that challenge, but to also look at some positive ways that it can be addressed. So when we write, we need to ask is this strengths-based? Especially in the ways in which we use language to talk about the problem as we contextualize the research question and the community we are working with. How can we ensure that those who are giving their time and expertise, and often the emotional component that goes with sharing, are honoured in a way that does not further victimize individuals or communities? As Kovach (2018, p. 227) explains “within Indigenous methodologies, researchers must care for the stories and those who offer them. In asking for individuals’ stories, it matters to respect their dignity, their voice, and their experience on their terms.”
Working from a strengths-based perspective raises the question of how we can describe broader social contexts in ways that retain the realities of the context but simultaneously allow findings from research to foster positive change, effectively drawing on existing strengths and contributing to related growth. When these findings are couched in negativity, in language that perpetuates challenges, potential strengths that should be highlighted through findings are in fact undermined.
Accordingly, we need to think about those very first words we use in our writing; just as Michele did in response to the opening sentence Linda had written for our chapter. If from the first line we have highlighted or emphasized this negativity, we have undermined community strengths, from the outset. As Michele explains, It cheats the rest of the piece. Irrespective of what you are writing, if you start out with that negative spin, without focusing on the complexity of the situation and without recognising that the community has a number of other strengths to contribute, you have undermined the potential value of the work.
Reflecting on the research she has been involved in, Michele believes that successful projects were underpinned by the early establishment of conceptual frameworks before the research even evolved into a proposal. This approach has allowed teams to identify the best ways for communities to contribute information, the best times to work with communities, and so forth. Consequently, this approach sets a strong framework for effective research partnerships. However, while we now set up data sharing agreements at the start of projects, we should also be establishing communication plans. Importantly, these shouldn’t be broad sweeping statements but rather set out the practicalities of producing dissemination products: understanding who has the authority to speak on behalf of the community and the project, and who has the capacity within the community to make sure the community is well engaged in the process and informed of the process and outcomes. As Wilson (2008) argues, “Because an idea is formed by relationships within a specific context, knowledge of what the listener or reader brings to the relationships…is needed in order to transmit the process of the idea in addition to the content” (p. 123). Accordingly, we propose drawing on communication plans and community perspective and wisdom to effectively describe context in ways that are respectful to community. We need to ensure that we have all of these pieces in place at the very beginning of projects and that we establish guidelines that will genuinely support the development of research dissemination products that honour communities and community strengths.
Building these guidelines in from the start helps challenge how we understand things along the way, to question whose frameworks and perspectives are informing the work. Research practice is still largely informed by Western and positivist frameworks that at the very least situate the academic researcher as expert. But this approach ignores local expertise: Who are the best people to engage in the project? What is the best way to ask questions so that people are actually responsive? How do we address the research itself in ways that make sense for the individual’s knowledge of what the community will respond to? Relational practice allows for continued relationship building within which bidirectional learning can take place. Accordingly, relational practice creates the space to redirect research processes to account for community knowledge and skills that are important to establishing good research. They are also really important to informing dissemination products including academic publications.
More recently, Linklater (2014) has also questioned the need for new ways of describing causal contexts. By way of example, she says, “trauma terminology implies that the individual is responsible for the response, rather than the broader systematic force caused by the state’s abuse of power” (p. 22). This urging is not new (see, e.g., Cannella & Lincoln, 2009; Ellsworth, 1989). Linklater’s reflection on the terminology used in mental health practice echoes Richardson’s (2000) discussion of writing as a key tool to the qualitative research process, where she eloquently argued that “When we view writing as a method,…we experience ‘language-in-use’, how we ‘word the world’ into existence” (p. 923). Reflecting on this, we wonder how we “word the world into existence” with the choices we make in our own dissemination projects, and how our research relationships and partnerships can help us challenge the ways in which we now habitually use terminology.
In conclusion, we urge researchers to focus on their role as writers and how this act of sharing reflects the respectful relational practice that frames our fieldwork. We ask writers to consider the ways in which their choice of words sustains and reinforces some worlds while undermining others. Echoing Borda’s words, we urge writers to challenge the often-unquestioned frameworks that have become entrenched in our vocabulary, even if they are seemingly liberatory, and work toward wording a more respectful world into existence.