To All Our Relations: Is Relational Accountability Possible With Nonlanded Communities?

• In Event: Reclaiming the Possibilities of Connectivity: Relationality in Education Research and Action

Abstract

Objectives: This paper explores how the authors navigate the tensions of building relational accountability (Wilson, 2008) when working in spaces that are not local to them, with non-landed people in the United States. As scholars who place the materiality of colonization central to our analysis (Tuck & Yang, 2012), we recognize Indigenous sovereignty as primary to any effort for social justice in the U.S.

Perspectives: We consider how our relationships with community leaders and stakeholders in dislocated and non-landed communities are mediated by colonial and imperial power relations. In building research relationships, Wilson reminds us to be deliberate and not begin without community engagement (2008). We ask how working with formal stakeholders and community “gatekeepers” to learn about the community context, understand questions “the community” would like explored, and gauging interest in a research-based relationship may reinscribe dominant power relations within local communities. Villenas (1996) reminds us that our social position as researchers may be (seen as) complicit with leaders community members do not trust. Further, those who have power/access to forms of capital within subaltern communities may be tied to narratives of “the community,” or as Spivak (1999) notes, “making one model of ‘concrete experience’ the model” (p. 256). We examine some complexities of relational accountability, from postcolonial thought (Spivak, 1999), Foucauldian accounts of power-knowledge (Foucault, 1998), and Indigenous (Byrd, 2011) and Chicana theory (Delgado Bernal 2002; Villenas, 1996). We consider where our accountability lies—with students who participate in research or those who give access to participants?

Methods: The authors grapple with Wilson’s (2008) ideas of community, collectivity and relationality via a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2010) of our research memos, field notes and reflections, specifically examining each author’s site selection, access, and gatekeepers, data verification and member checks.

Data Sources: Author 1 explores data drawn from an 18-month multi-sited ethnographic study with arrivant Muslim youth who were being surveilled by policing agencies.
Data includes 40 hours of video and audio recordings, along with field notes from community meetings, social gatherings, and political events as well as data from interviews and focus groups with 20 youth. Author 2 discusses steps outside of IRB requirements to build and extend relationships and accountability with Indigenous high school students in a seven-month study with Indigenous youth on civic identity, struggling against assimilationist ideas about citizenship. Data includes 20 hours of recordings from interviews and focus groups with students along with field notes.

Significance: Wilson notes much research that takes place in Indigenous communities does not have “any relevance for the communities being studied...researchers come into communities, do whatever they do and leave, never to be heard from again” (2008, p. 15). Colonial structures of IRBs and methodologies that “other” research participants support the “insidious nature of a Eurocentric epistemological perspective to subtly...shape the belief system and practices of researchers” (Delgado Bernal, p. 111). Accountability to participants and scholarly colleagues is a powerful commitment, striking at the roots of a colonized research paradigm within the academy.

Authors

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, George Washington University

• Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University