Research theory and practice

About a year ago we (Mia Perry and Jo Sharp) sat together to brainstorm a way to collaborate across different ways of doing international development research, motivated with the contention that the approaches we encounter very often assume the worldview of the northern partners. Our experience shows that even work that is well-intentioned emerges from inequalities: due to the structures and infrastructures that supply our salaries and support our capacities, the different access to resources available to partners, and even the expectations of what each considered appropriate work for the project.

Rather than sit and moan or critique, and rather than concoct another project, we decided to explore and articulate some of the lessons and principles that we’d been fortunate enough to encounter about partnerships and collaborations over the past years with international colleagues.

The Critical Resource for Ethical International Partnerships is the result of a week-long workshop hosted by the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, attended by colleagues from Uganda, Botswana, Italy, Malawi, Canada, Bangladesh, and Scotland.  Drawing on experiences of international, interdisciplinary and cross sector projects we explored the processes that had led us to the work, our expectations of project formation and conceptualisation, the day-to-day practicalities of the doing of the project, and the ways in which project outcomes were managed and prioritised.

What became paramount across our discussions was the importance of openness and reflexivity – to difference, to our own expectations and hopes, to the range and realities of contexts from which partners came to participate from. The Critical Resource seeks to offer some nudges, provocations, and guidance to those either well practiced or starting out with new partnerships, to help promote the importance of reflexivity and honesty with one another in the context of international development related research.

This chapter is based on three basic assumptions: Firstly, all research revolves around the researcher, until it reaches the reader. Secondly, what we can see, learn, and feel, is determined by the questions that frame and guide the intention or inquiry; what we know is predicted by the questions we are able to ask. Thirdly, the articulation of literacy research is a project, in part, of persuasion within the complex systems of academia and education. Putting these three premises to the forefront at once simplifies, bounds, and liberates the project, or industry, of research in the living moments and movements of literacy.

Beginning with a playful exploration of these premises, I position affect and movement in relation to the social, historical, and discursive forces always at play in research. I map the place of affect in the context of the research question, which leads me to the research context, which leads me to the institutional and the political context. I propose that there is no such thing as an innocent methodology, and that the life – the energy of the literacy practice-research interaction – is transformed into learning-research in alignment with the contexts surrounding it. This chapter challenges us to allow and account for the multiple and emerging layers of purpose and person present and alive in each piece of research, no matter how coded to smithereens or danced to abstraction it might be.

I invite readers to attend to the affects and the impulses caused by examples of certain types of research (that take up movement in various ways) and position these possible affects in relation to the wider systems in which they were created. Finally, in this chapter, I propose that with the vast scope already out there in terms of alternative, creative, affective methods of representation, what we seek, as researchers and educators, is not to re-insert movement where is wasn’t, or to express affect where it wasn’t, but rather, to instill in our readers and students the awareness of affect, and from here extend its possibilities of impact.

This chapter is based on three basic assumptions: Firstly, all research revolves around the researcher, until it reaches the reader. Secondly, what we can see, learn, and feel, is determined by the questions that frame and guide the intention or inquiry; what we know is predicted by the questions we are able to ask. Thirdly, the articulation of literacy research is a project, in part, of persuasion within the complex systems of academia and education. Putting these three premises to the forefront at once simplifies, bounds, and liberates the project, or industry, of research in the living moments and movements of literacy.

Beginning with a playful exploration of these premises, I position affect and movement in relation to the social, historical, and discursive forces always at play in research. I map the place of affect in the context of the research question, which leads me to the research context, which leads me to the institutional and the political context. I propose that there is no such thing as an innocent methodology, and that the life – the energy of the literacy practice-research interaction – is transformed into learning-research in alignment with the contexts surrounding it. This chapter challenges us to allow and account for the multiple and emerging layers of purpose and person present and alive in each piece of research, no matter how coded to smithereens or danced to abstraction it might be.

I invite readers to attend to the affects and the impulses caused by examples of certain types of research (that take up movement in various ways) and position these possible affects in relation to the wider systems in which they were created. Finally, in this chapter, I propose that with the vast scope already out there in terms of alternative, creative, affective methods of representation, what we seek, as researchers and educators, is not to re-insert movement where is wasn’t, or to express affect where it wasn’t, but rather, to instill in our readers and students the awareness of affect, and from here extend its possibilities of impact.