(REM2) Sustaining the Researcher: Sharing and Learning from Research Experiences

This session creates space for researchers to reflect on and share lessons learned from their research experiences. Reflexive and reflective work that highlights the emotions, insights, and work of researchers allows for important discussion surrounding a shared future for ethical, meaningful, and action-oriented sociological research. This is more true than ever as new and evolving research spaces (e.g., online platforms and virtual communities) demand contemporary approaches and practices from researchers. The aims of this session are twofold. First, this session aims to creatively and critically learn from research experiences and places central importance on the researcher, thereby situating and sustaining the role of the researcher, whether we consider that inevitable, contaminating, insightful or not. Haraway’s (1998) seminal paper on situated knowledges reminds us that research is never conducted “everywhere and nowhere” but, rather, by an individual or set of individuals with partial “vision.” This session aims to explore the possibilities and potentials offered by researcher positionalities (e.g., by virtue of “insider”/“outsider” status, among other characteristics, relationships, histories, and futures). Second, this session asks: How can we sustain ourselves as researchers? As researchers are pressured to make themselves more public, for research reasons and beyond, what risks, challenges, and tensions might we face and, importantly, how can we navigate them? How can we sustain the well-being and curiosity of the researcher? Tags: Communities, Knowledge, Research Methods

Organizer: Amber-Lee Varadi, York University; Chair: Amber-Lee Varadi, York University

Presentations

Joanis Sherry, Carleton University; Jaclyn Tompalski, Carleton University

Reflections on researching dispossession and genocide as Indigenous and Black graduate students

This presentation offers a unique perspective on the experiences of two graduate students, one black and one indigenous, serving as research assistants analyzing French and English archival texts for evidence of terra nullius in the Pontiac region. This project argued that the industrial development of the Pontiac region cannot be understood outside of a political economy of dispossession. In this presentation here, we argue conducting research related to settler colonialism, as black and indigenous graduate students, is deeply personal and at times traumatizing work that requires further reflection in order to ensure the sustainability of researchers throughout the research process. Throughout our engagement with archival documents, we were confronted with frequent instances of anti-indigenous and anti-black racism. Through regular dialogue between ourselves and the primary researcher on the project, we unraveled the layers of racism and colonialism embedded within the historical texts, and the ways this ‘historic’ racism operates in the present when re-read. These discussions provided a space to critically examine our positionality within the research project (as researchers and black and indigenous co-conspirators) and consider how this kind of community engaged research can be improved to support future black and indigenous student researchers. Drawing from black feminist, indigenous feminist, and decolonial frameworks, we explore the emotional, intellectual, and ethical challenges we encountered while researching historic accounts of dispossession in the Pontiac region. Our reflections illuminate the complex relationship between working with archival data, identity, and the ongoing impact of racism while researching in the settler colonial university. Most prominently, we reflect on the various affects and emotions evoked by reading accounts of genocide in the Canadian context. These emotions stimulate further discussions about the emotional and physical labour required to engage in research work related to genocide and dispossession. While this work was done in exchange for a wage, the emotional labour required to efficiently complete the project as per project and grant timelines often raised questions about the limitations of financial compensation for such deeply traumatizing work. Rather than call for the discontinuation of such critical work altogether, we offer recommendations to make this kind of research more sustainable for black and indigenous students. This includes a reflection on the opportunities for solidarity building between black and indigenous students, as well as faculty, within and against settler colonialism. In full, we suggest it is both the work done as researchers and our time spent away from the project itself that informs a more robust research practice. The continuous negotiation of our identities as black and indigenous researchers who ourselves also experience the effects of settler colonialism demands the undoing of neat boundaries between researcher and focus of study, and calls us into a deeper relationship with the goals and aims of our research project, namely, decolonization. This presentation provides an opportunity for researchers to contemplate the caring relationships that sustain research projects. We invite folks to consider how they care for themselves, those impacted by their research, and those with whom they research. How might a deeper reflection on grief, sadness, and joy allow for more engaged research? How might these reflections create the conditions for co-resistance? Lastly, how might these reflections allow for the transformation of researchers?

Azar Masoumi, Carleton University; Roodabeh Dehghani, University of Ottawa; Sarah Orcutt, Carleton University

The Monetary Politics of Research: Research Incentives in Interviews with Low-Income Workers

This paper explores the impact of the use of monetary research incentives (i.e. cash gifts) in qualitative research interviews. As researchers, we often consider research incentives as an effective means of attracting and recruiting participants or, at most, as a deserved and respectful token of appreciation indicating the value of participants’ knowledge and time. In this paper, I examine the far more complex ramifications of the use of research incentives to suggest that monetary incentives can gravely shape the relationship between researchers and participants and, as such, impact the types and volume of data that we generate. This might be particularly true in research with low-income earning participants and when the monetary value of the research incentive offered is equivalent to or higher than the value assigned to participants’ time in the market-driven, hierarchal, and exploitative capitalistic labour market. This paper draws on observations made before, during and after sixty-five interviews with refugee language interpreters across Canada (Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver). The participants were largely racialized, immigrant, precarious and low-income workers whose hourly wages were in most instances lower than the incentive offered for participating in this research. My observations reveal unanticipated and at times surprising patterns arising from the advertised and actual monetary exchange of incentives during the data collection and recruitment processes. In this presentation, I discuss three main patterns that emerged from the use of research incentives in my study with refugee interpreters. First, I suggest that monetary incentives have the capacity to place researchers and low-income participants in relationships of cross-class solidarity, by signifying political allyship. In these instances, the use of incentives strengthens the rapport between researchers and participants and allows more in-depth data collection. Second, I suggest that the use of research incentives may place researchers and participants in relationships resembling those between employers and employees, inadvertently creating an urge in participants to “earn” the value of the incentive by providing “enough” data and “satisfying” the research needs of the researcher. Third, research incentives may be used by participants to resist power imbalances and establish a relation of benevolent and charitable equality between the researchers and participants. In these instances, the participants may, for example, resist receiving the incentive or notify the researcher that the incentive will be donated to appropriate and more deserving populations, hence placing themselves as equal and equally benevolent parties in relation to researchers. These three patterns suggest that administration of monetary incentives is highly meaningful to participants and that research incentives can be interpreted diversely by those recruited to participate in research projects. Whether interpreted as political symbols, quasi-wages or charitable donations, the use of research incentives is productive of significant interpersonal dynamics that inevitably shape the process of data collection and participant-assisted recruitment.

Jade Da Costa, University of Guelph

(Un)imagined Participants: Theorizing the Accidental Other Within and Beyond Critical HIV/AIDS Research

This presentation draws on findings from my doctoral research, From Racial Hauntings to Wondrous Echoes: Towards a Collective Memory of HIV/AIDS Resistance , to explore the methodological limitations of theorizing the Accidental Other: participants who are of Other, outsider status to the researcher, and do not match the imagined population of the study. For my research, I interviewed younger racialized and Indigenous activists (aged 18–35) who did work either in or related to HIV/AIDS advocacy about what they knew about local histories of HIV/AIDS resistance. Who I considered to be an activist was inadvertently informed by the same activist currents that shaped my work: Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (QTBIPOC) movements within and around Tkaronto that mobilize abolitionist, intersectional, decolonial, and grassroots politics. Of the 60 participants whom I interviewed, 35 of them matched this unspoken criterion, whereas the remaining 25 embodied a double Otherness that I had neither expected nor planned for. In addition to exclusively identifying as Black, cishet, and HIV-positive (all categories that I identify as either Outsider or Other too), many of these individuals claimed to not believe in racism and invoked biomedical and neoliberal conceptions of HIV that critical HIV/AIDS research and activism rebukes. This chasm within my sample forced me not only to reckon with the bias that I had unknowingly built into my study, but with the ethics of potentially theorizing the narratives of these Accidental Others: participants whose realities I neither related to nor had accounted for. Drawing on the insights that I learned from this experience, I argue that there are clear-cut moments in which sociologists should not theorize their participants’ experiences; but rather, act as platforms for their narratives.