Key question 2: How is sustainability of research practices shaped (and constrained) by institutions/structures outside of the research context?

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Creating sustainable research practices in comparative & international education

Proposal

The discussion of research practices often focuses on issues that directly highlight the interaction between researcher and participants – e.g. ethics, nature of relationships, identity of researcher, language, and so on. However, sustainability is also shaped by external structures that can either facilitate or constrain researcher-participant interactions. These include funding, the sociopolitical context, what is ‘acceptable’ to advisors/peer reviewers/fellow scholars (at both a personal level and in terms of the ‘legitimate’ research practices we raise in part 1 of this roundtable).
In considering methodology as a practice of sustainable research, not enough attention is given to these external constraints, particularly as they arise in the context of international research or research in multiple/comparative environments where the context may shape possibilities in different ways – they therefore have implications for comparison itself and comparative methodology (and what that means) as well as for the sustainability of research in any given context.
Thus, in this part of our roundtable, we wish to open the discussion to address these constraints in concrete ways, in particular addressing possibilities for overcoming barriers that these structures may create. For instance, what opportunities might be created by digital technologies? How might the same privileges held by researchers vis-à-vis research participants at an individual level be leveraged to create spaces for relationships to develop (and what kind of tensions might this cause)?

Author

• Karen Ross, University of Massachusetts Boston