- Title
- Footprints across the beach: beyond researcher-centered methodologies
- Creator
- Suchet-Pearson, Sandie; Wright, Sarah; Lloyd, Kate; Burarrwanga, Laklak; Hodge, Paul
- Relation
- A Deeper Sense of Place: Stories and Journeys of Indigenous-Academic Collaboration p. 21-40
- Relation
- http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/book/deeper-sense-of-place
- Publisher
- Oregon State University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- This is a story of lives entwined and of new places of being and belonging. It is also a collaborative narrative of unexpected transformations. The "interplay of knowledges" described above challenges many of the rigors and certainties required by and guiding academic conventions. The co-created narratives enabled by the Indigenous-academic collaboration tell a story of new places to belong as the three female academic researchers "take off their shoes;' walk on the beach, and learn. It is also a story where the Indigenous Yolngu researchers and their families find a place to belong in the South East of Australia, in transdisciplinary spaces within the academy and in the homes and lives of the academics. But it is more than that, too. In this chapter we aim to deepen current understandings of collaboration in geography. We challenge the researcher-centeredness of much collaborative literature by discussing two further methodological sites of agency: the families of all researchers involved in the collaboration and Bawaka country itself as it actively creates and is created by our collaboration. As with the beach at Bawaka and the inscription of knowledges back and forth, so too the long path between Bawaka and the South East marks the flow of knowledges to and fro. As we each find new places to belong both in and out of place, we transform ourselves, our families, and our geographies. In turn, our geographies, families, and places transform us. This collaborative process embodies new conceptual and methodological landscapes that challenge and transform traditional ways of imagining and enacting geography. We begin the chapter with a discussion of the features of collaborative research in human geography and how they have emerged. We explore the main attributes that characterize a shift in methodological traditions and highlight participatory action research and the development of Indigenous methodologies. We emphasize several examples of Indigenous-academic collaborations to show the recent surfacing of transdisciplinary spaces within the discipline, which are representative of the kinds of transformed geographies that characterize our collaboration. Having introduced the contextual terrain, we embark on our own stories of entwined lives and transformation. To give voice to these personalized accounts, we speak in the first person to capture the highly situated meanings that each of us attaches to our cultural and context-specific practices. These shared stories are presented under three descriptive headings. The first frames the background and introduces the initial connections and hard work involved in the sheer logistics of conducting family accompanied fieldwork. Here we focus on the role of the researchers and the need for trust, respect, reciprocity, and flexibility in research collaborations. The following sections describe the methodological sites of agency that make up the rest of the chapter: families and nonhuman elements in Indigenous-academic collaborative research. Guiding these two sections is a brief synopsis of the literature on these emerging themes, which challenge existing conceptual and methodological understandings of what constitutes collaboration in geography.
- Subject
- geographies; collaborative research; Indigenous methodologies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059134
- Identifier
- uon:16533
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780870717222
- Language
- eng
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