Partnerships, Friendships, and the Research-Practice Divide

• In Event: The politics of knowledge production in international partnerships: Ethical dilemmas in North-South research

Abstract

This paper reflects on two colleague’s near-20 year partnership and friendship, and the effects of this on our development as educationalists with a shared goal of improving the lives of Malawian children and youth. Many research partnerships are created for a particular research project; give structural primacy to Western-based partners and their discourses, practices, and resources; and include members who have not had extensive knowledge of one another previously. Our friendship began with the opposite structural contingencies, and has included numerous (research) interactions of greater and lesser formality, and in which the ineractional forms allowed us to shift back and forth between positions of learner and teacher with relative flexibility. Our different professional tracks (one in a non-governmental organization, one in academia) have likewise allowed us to challenge and play with one another across the (overly determined) lines of “research” and “practice” in academic and international development efforts. This relationship, in which each of us has experienced both great support and intense challenges, has affected how we each conceptualize the goals of our work and structure our engagement in educational research and practice. We argue that generative, multidirectional, and trust-filled models of research partnership, based on longstanding relationships with people, places, and central concerns, might offer a model of “North-South” (research) partnership that is particularly available to ethnographers and other qualitative researchers, and that centers the importance of forming mutually unstable hierarchies and working across domains of comfort.

Authors

• Nancy Kendall, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Madalo Samati, CRECCOM