Living ethics: a narrative of collaboration and belonging in a research team

Abstract

In this paper, we document and describe our collaboration on a project investigating individuals’ experiences of identity, participation, and belonging in higher education. We pay particular attention to the formal set of principles that we developed to govern collaboration, ownership and authorship within the research project and the ways that those principles are enacted in our team. Through our collaboration, we have come to acknowledge our research team as a space of belonging where all team members are accepted and welcomed. This sense of belonging provides a personal perspective on collaboration that is missing in most studies of research collaboration. We use the motif of ‘living ethics’ to capture defining qualities of the relationship deliberately cultivated between and among research team members. Through this narrative inquiry, we advance theoretical understandings of the notions of collaboration, belonging, and ethical research practices that can serve as potential models but not a blueprint for other research collaborations.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association annual conference in San Diego, CA in April 2004. This work is supported in part by Standard Research Grant Number 410‐2002‐0630 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.