Doing community engaged research 'in a good way': learning to honour commitments to community in academic environments


Jennifer Braun, Concordia University of Edmonton; Saira Shearer, University of Alberta

This presentation will explore a Community Engaged Research project undertaken between a Sociology honors undergraduate student at The Kings University and employees of an Indigenous-serving non-profit, the Bent Arrow Healing Society in Edmonton, Alberta. The goal of this CER project was to understand and document (through field work observation) what it meant for select employees of Bent Arrow to work ‘in a good way’. The objectives of the presentation are to discuss the challenges (and successes) we encountered as teacher/supervisor and student through each step of the research process; from ethics approval to presenting the results to the community we worked with. The main challenges stemmed from our desire to do research ‘in a good way’ with our Indigenous partners while negotiating the requirements of the academic institution. The presentation will include the perspective of both the researcher supervisor and teacher (Dr. Jennifer Braun) and the student researcher (Saira Shearer) highlighting the experience of doing a CER project at a small, undergraduate teaching institution. It will delve into the particular challenges associated with conveying research through unconventional means within academia, underscoring the significance of decolonizing traditional research practices.

This paper will be presented at the following session: