Researchers as Humble Hosts: Four Stories About Re-Examining Roles and Enacting New Relationships Through Research

Multiple Presenter Session: Panel

Abstract

What happens when researchers design studies and “host” their participants from a place of humility, authenticity, and vulnerability? In a challenge to the prevailing social science research model of researcher as dominant and external, extracting and examining data from participants in a subordinate position, often in controlled and sanitized settings, this panel will explore the stories of researchers who brought a fuller version of themselves to the process. These four studies highlight research processes that lift the curtain on the researcher as powerful orchestrator, revealing instead fellow explorers on the knowledge-creation journey. Designing and facilitating the work required courage and care. However, by beginning to liberate themselves to show up as human beings, researchers, in turn, freed participants. Together, they challenged the ethics of extraction and historical roles in research contexts, helping develop collaborative, co-creative, reciprocally beneficial research structures that are inherently healing and potentially decolonizing.

Sub Track

• AESA

Chair

• Sandra Soto, None

Discussant

• Florence Barbour, None

Presenters

• Eric Karahalis, Molloy University

• Kimberly Ferina, Molloy University