Relational Accountability in Research: Protecting Promises

• In Event: Centering Epistemologies of Family: Relationality, Mutuality, and Care

Abstract

In this symposium presentation, the author centers the relationships of five Indigenous mothers (Coast Salish, Salish, Wampanoag, Lakota, Inupiaq) their children, and him. Author 2 spent one year with the families listening and learning with them about the ways lessons of Indigeneity (the enacting of living and being Indigenous) were shared intergenerationally in the homes and communities of these families. The focus for this presentation is a guided narration of the long-term relationships between the author and participants, asking and answering the question: When working with close friends turned family, what are the possibilities of research rooted in relationships?
In answering, Author 2 pushes back upon western research norms that view the close proximity of relationships as a detriment to the overall “validity” of the work by I relying heavily on the intersections of Projects in Humanization (Author & “VK”, 2017), Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies (McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014), and Indigenous Research Methodologies (Archibald, 2008; Kovach, 2018; Tachine, 2018). Collectively, these research theories, pedagogical theories, and methodologies attempt to answer Davidson’s call that “We need ... a methodology that allows us to be our authentic selves—that is, an extension of who we are as researchers, and human beings” (2019, p. 38-39).
The purpose of the stories shared in this work is to provide the context, the voice, and the emotional impact to what education looks like, sounds like, is like beyond schooling walls and into the homes and communities of Indigenous families or, as framed in our overall symposium, we need to better understand—"How education has operated as a social process outside of the White and hegemonic gazes.” This work bears witness to everyday actions of families and the ways those actions disrupt schooling education paradigms while envisioning and imagining what education can and should be for students (Sabzalian, 2019). Knowing the lessons learned between mothers and their children, these stories provide opportunities to see the richness and complexity of culture and language within the home and offer a storied navigation into the ways these stories were shared, recorded, and co-authored collectively.

Author

• Timothy Jose San Pedro, The Ohio State University