Rethinking Accountability Through Collaborative Research Conversations: Imperfections, Intentionality, and Politics

• In Event: 67.057 - Common Worlding Methods: (Im)Possibilities of Post-Qualitative Research

Abstract

This poster responds to the provocation offered in the session outline: “what conversations do postqualitative transversal methods put into play, and are we, as researchers, suitably prepared and adequately accountable?” We, five emerging and established researchers, make visible our imperfect, intentional, and political processes of deciding which knowledges we draw into our research. Bringing four research sites into conversation, we grapple with how the diverse theoretical, artistic, lived, and scientific ways of knowing we bring together shape how we craft methodological practices that answer to the complex worlds we inhabit and inherit with children. We are guided by Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) call to generate situated webs of knowledge politics that intentionally hold critical thinking alongside urgent obligations. For Bellacasa, crafting collaborative spaces where “knowledge that fosters caring for neglected things enters in tension between a critical stance against neglect and the fostering of speculative commitment to think how things could be different” (p. 17) is an urgent priority in post-truth worlds. As such, we understand that with whom our research thinks is a non-innocent, constant, and risky negotiation; a practice of responding to the epistemological tensions we participate in as researchers.

We read our creative ethnographic research projects (Elliott & Culhane, 2017) alongside one another to trace how the decisions we make as we integrated varied knowledges but not others into our work draw us into specific relations of accountability. From London, Canada and Melbourne, Australia we share empirical inquiries where children and educators complexify their relations with clay while thinking with Indigenous knowledges, artistic interventions, and clay science. Knotting Reggio Emilia early childhood education pedagogies, lived experiences in Ontario, and an attunement to the aesthetic contours of everyday early childhood education, we build the concept of “learningliving” as an alternative ethic for doing research with children and educators. Finally, we present a pedagogical inquiry from Victoria, Canada that thinks with physiological sciences, feminist science studies, and children’s relations with bodies.

We contend that our privileged choices of which knowledges, and whom we presence in our research, are not pre-determined by an impermeable conceptual framework. Instead, we argue, shaping research conversations is a constantly evolving methodological, political, and ethical practice (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Stengers, 2018) that allows us to unsettle Euro-Western epistemological silos that govern which knowledges should dialogue with our work. This poster advances questions of accountability relevant across postqualitative theorizing (Lather, 2016; St. Pierre et al., 2016): how might we bring together situated ideas and knowledges (Haraway, 2016) that sit in tense, uncertain, or unequal relations with ideas, knowledges, and theories that matter in the relational places we research with? How do we answer to the settler colonial histories Euro-Western knowledges owe to, while thinking with postqualitative paradigms largely informed by different Euro-Western approaches? When we understand our methodological conversations through questions of accountability, to whom - to what lives and precarities - do our research choices answer in post-truth worlds?

Authors

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario

• Kelly Boucher, Victoria University - Melbourne

• Nicole Land, Ryerson University

• Randa Khattar, Charles Sturt University

• Karyn Callaghan, Charles Sturt University