Exploring the fault lines of cross‐cultural collaborative research

Abstract

This paper explores issues emerging from the authors’ experiences of collaborative research in Ghana, by researchers from a Ghanaian and a British university. The text emerges from discussions between partners and in retrospective reflection on the research process. It is constructed by bringing together personal accounts of the different authors in which their identities shift and are reconstructed in the process of the research. Multiple perspectives across gender, nationality and institutional context create three fault lines to disturb the research process: the initiation of the research, the methodological engagement of the team with each other and the subjects, and the way these are played out in practical issues. The paper explores the problems created by the instabilities created but suggests that they open up spaces for decolonizing research.

Keywords:

• Research methodology
• Intercultural collaboration
• power
• identity

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, 2007 and at the UKFIET Conference, Oxford, 2007. We are grateful for the suggestions of those who responded to it then and subsequently.

Notes

1. Literally one from over the horizon, a foreigner, a white person.

2. In the ‘non‐funded research’ the British Council/Department for International Development provided travelling and subsistence expenses only; ‘funded research’ involved paying for researchers’ time and expenses.