Relationships: An Indigenous Transnational Research Paradigm

Abstract

What meanings can be made from an eight-week intense diverse cultural experience?In every community-based research experience are consistent tensions aroundcreating, negotiating, and establishing solid, trusting relationships in an acceleratedand constrained timeframe. Four common elements have been identified in thedynamics of these relationships: trust, intimacy, mutuality, and responsibility. It iscritical to note how this research team worked through these tensions, and not thedynamics of these tensions. My engagement with Indigenous community-basedresearch meant that I was not simply immersed in an experience, I was theexperience; I was not an objective observer, but became the observed. It was a processof continually contesting my own perceptions of reality and ways of generatingmeaning.