Community-university collaborations: creating hybrid research and collective identities

Abstract

In this article we explore the politics of community-university collaborative research and activism. We are scholars based in universities as well as members of various ‘communities’—queer, Pasifika and Māori—hence we regularly venture beyond the formal research spaces of the academy and enter into critical collaborative research with others working in ‘the community’. In what follows we first outline collaborative community-based research literature that advocates hybrid research collectivities. Second, we give some context and background to our methodologies that have enabled us to re-think collaborative research. Third, examples from our research are offered to illustrate the ways in which collaborative research constructs new collective identities. Finally, we conclude by arguing that social science scholars working across university-community boundaries may expand and multiply hybrid research collectives, and thereby effect positive social change at many levels.

Keywords:

• collaborative
• hybrid research collectivities
• community
• social change

Introduction

Community-university collaborative research and activism can be very rewarding, propelling scholars into new research spaces where new collective identities are formed. It may also be, however, time-consuming and fraught with difficulties. Whether community-university collaborative research and activism has positive and/or negative outcomes, what is clear is that scholars bring a range of resources into each situation. Each of us is a scholar based in a university as well as a member of various ‘communities’—queer, Pasifika and Māori—and we regularly venture beyond the formal research spaces of the academy and enter into critical collaborative research with others working in ‘the community’. We are motivated to conduct collaborative research that challenges social, cultural and economic inequalities in both academic and everyday community spaces.

Our understanding of ‘critical community collaboration’ is informed by our theories and practice (praxis), as we connect with communities, groups, social movements and nongovernment organisations who challenge various normative practices of dominating power. Ideally, critical community collaboration aims to create inclusive participatory and anti-hierarchical spaces of action, and nurture creative interaction. For this type of ‘action-oriented research’ (as Rachel Pain described it in 2003), ‘relevance’ and ‘criticality’ entail making commitments to certain kinds of action research (Routledge 2009).

In our own community collaborations, we work with a range of individuals, groups, organisations and communities. As part of her doctoral research, Jenny worked alongside nine Pacific communities in Auckland, New Zealand, in a 10-year relationship with the Waitakere Pacific Board. She initially engaged in the project as a consultant to develop ‘Pacific Paradise’—an experimental research concept which would consist of nine living villages, a business incubator and a fale, with the hope that it would become a central focal point for New Zealand-Pacific migrants. This meant working alongside nine communities, families, an advocacy group, the Waitakere Pacific Board, a steering group of elders, a project team that was run by ‘young’ researchers, and the Waikato Management School of the University of Waikato.

Yvonne works collaboratively as part of numerous feminist and Pacific island communities, including DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era—a global network of feminist advocates and scholars from the global economic south) as well as Māori communities, such as the Te Runanga o Te Rarawa. In 2005, Yvonne, along with a university colleague—Nick Lewis—worked as part of the Whānau Action Development Research Project. Te Runanga o Te Rarawa is the tribal council representing the interests of the marae (tribal commons) and hapu (a subtribal kin group) that make up the iwi (a Māori tribe) of Te Rarawa in the far north of Aotearoa New Zealand. Yvonne and Nick were approached by Te Rawara officials to help secure a valuable funding stream that was tagged to marshal resources for material development in the area. Yvonne and Nick—who were not from Te Rarawa—provided independent intellectual support and credibility at crucial stages in the project and worked alongside the funding agency, locally centred researchers and project experts (see Underhill-Sem & Lewis 2008).

Lynda is co-chairperson/activist/researcher in and with the queer community group ‘Hamilton Pride’. Hamilton Pride consists of about 15 core people who organise an annual festival as well as other activities (Johnston 2010). Hamilton Pride's main objectives are to serve as a liaison between various community groups as Pride events are coordinated and organised, publicise Hamilton Pride events locally and nationally through various media and support various community groups as they come together to organise annual Pride events. Hamilton Pride festivals and activities on World AIDS Days (WAD) have shown that direct action is about visibility, celebration and letting Hamilton know that sexual and gender difference and diversity (gay, lesbian, bisexual, takatāpui, transgender, intersex, queer, pansexual and so on) should be welcomed, not discouraged, and definitely not marginalised. The research that Lynda conducted with and for Hamilton Pride is based on the following key objectives: to understand more about the complex social, cultural, emotional and political issues facing non-heterosexual people in Hamilton; and to use the research to improve social cohesion and inclusion for non-heterosexuals in an increasingly diverse, and yet still heteronormative and often anti-homosexual, society.

Carey-Ann recently completed a doctoral thesis that explores the everyday domestic spaces and practices of heterosexual love (Morrison 2010). She was employed as a research assistant for a Building Research Capability in the Social Sciences Network (BRCSS) funded research project, ‘Research as relationship: Critical reflections on collaboration’, at the University of Waikato. BRCSS is a virtual research community which spans New Zealand's eight universities and aims to support capability building and the development of new research in the social sciences through collaborative and networked initiatives (www.brcss.net.nz). In March 2010, BRCSS announced a new round of research grants—Seeding Social Science Research Initiatives (SSSRI)—which aimed to generate research outcomes and enhance the capacities of individual researchers and the wider capabilities of social science in New Zealand. It was this initiative that served as the rudiment of our reflections on collaboration and the subsequent article.

We see collaboration as consistent with the feminist goals of challenging hierarchal relationships and of conducting research in a way that strives to change society for the better (Monk et al. 2003; Gilbert & Masucci 2008). Feminist research is concerned with political commitment and critical and reflexive engagement. It argues ‘for a collapsing of the social hierarchies that elevate the academy over the community, the office/laboratory over the field site, the researcher over the researched, and the institutionalization of knowledge in the global north over the generation of knowledge in the global south’ (Wright 2008:381). We take the view that feminist-informed research collaborations are about more than simply the design of research, modes of data collection, and the analysis and dissemination of results; they are also about being attentive to the ‘relationships among people involved in the research process’ (Moss 2002:12).

In what follows, we first outline a critical collaborative community-based research literature that advocates hybrid research collectivities. Second, we give some context and background to our methodologies that enable us to write this article collaboratively. Third, in the section entitled ‘Crossing university/community boundaries’, examples from each of our research projects are offered to illustrate the ways in which we as scholars ‘act out’ our theoretical knowledge to collaborate and advance the political, social and cultural aims of our diverse community groups. Finally, we conclude by arguing that social scientists working across university-community boundaries may usefully expand and multiply hybrid research collectives, and thereby effect positive social change at many levels.

Collaborations, collectivies, communities

Kitchin and Hubbard (1999:195) suggest that most academics ‘seek to maintain a scholarly “distance” between their activism and their teaching, research and publishing activities, and do not incorporate such activist concerns into their “disciplinary” life’. They continue by commenting that crossing the boundaries between the spaces of activism and academia is problematic. In crossing the divide, scholars venture beyond the formal research spaces of the academy and enter into critical collaborative research with others working in—what is sometimes called—‘the wild’ (Callon & Rabeharisoa 2003).

Venturing into ‘the wild’ means connecting with ‘resisting others’ who are already making new worlds for themselves. Critical collaborations in ‘the wild’ may take the form of scholarly engagements with civil society groups, communities, localities, non-government organisations, social movements and businesses (Gibson-Graham 2008; Routledge 2009). The connection that takes place between academy and the community results in what is sometimes termed a ‘hybrid research collective’ (Callon & Rabeharisoa 2003). Gibson-Graham and Roelvink (2009) suggest that a hybrid research collective is an assemblage of people that, through research, increases possibilities for (being in) the world. The research produced by the assemblage offers alternative ways of living, thinking and knowing that go beyond and actively challenge various normative practices of dominating power. Likewise, Fuller and Kitchin (2004) see the role of the academic as primarily that of enabler or facilitator who works collaboratively with diverse communities. This means that rather than attempting to bridge the supposed divide between the academy and the community, by for example becoming ‘activists’ in the traditional sense, we can exercise our academic capacities in a performative way by bringing our location, networks and knowledge together with others in a critical collaborative manner.

An example of collaboration ‘in the wild’ is offered by Gibson-Graham (2008).1 They demonstrate how they bring together community members who are often excluded from mainstream capitalist economies (unemployed youth, single parents, women carers, rural people in poor city areas of the ‘third world’), as well as local government officials, national government institutions, NGOs and alternative and non-capitalist enterprises, in order to generate new knowledge about ‘diverse economies’. Rather than pose the traditional and sometimes limiting question of ‘what is to be done’ to generate change, they chose to assemble examples of ‘what is already being done’ out in ‘the wild’ in order to contribute to the creditability and strengthening of alternative economies. Also taking this approach, Cameron et al. (2010) organised an interactive workshop-bus trip which allowed community gardeners and researchers to come together to reflect upon and discuss their gardening practices. They explain: ‘academic researchers and other concerned community members came together to contribute their expertise, knowledge and insights to collectively produce new knowledge’ (Cameron et al. 2010:5).

In a different ‘green’ space, Routledge (1996) describes his involvement in a campaign against the planned extension of the M77 motorway through Glasgow's largest green area. He notes that the campaign brought together a variety of organisations, groups, and individuals: ‘The resistance included (at various times): local residents, school children, and councillors from the housing estates which bordered the proposed route of the M77, Glasgow-based students, “professionals” (including academics, social workers, and artists), unemployed folk, and unemployed environmental activists’ (Routledge 1996:404). More recently, Roelvink (2010) is interested in the range of collectives that gather together diverse participants under the banner of the anti-globalisation movement. She notes that these collectives have purposely moved away from a politics that aims to uncover and resist neoliberal ideology because the discourses of neoliberalism do not necessarily generate alternative knowledge and possibilities for being in the world. This hybrid research collective that Roelvink (2010) was part of was made up of technologies for dialogue, food markets, tents, participants and their networks that reached beyond. She became more than a critical observer; as she reflects, it changed ‘habits of thinking and trained me to appreciate the diverse economic interventions and alternatives around the world’ (Roelvink 2010:117).

Collaboration, therefore, entails being open to learning and understanding from others rather than judging or seeking to uncover ‘the truth’. As Gibson-Graham (2008); see also Gibson-Graham & Roelvink 2010) suggest, this means becoming an experimental researcher. To be an experimental researcher means to take on an ‘open, concerned and connected stance and a readiness to explore rather than judge, giving what is nascent and not fully formed some room to move and grow’ (Gibson-Graham 2008:620). An experimental researcher is critically engaged and ‘strives to work both within the academy and outside it, to live theory as a series of practices – experimental, experiential, imaginative’ (Routledge 1996:403). The notion of experimental researcher points to the changing role of academics in producing knowledge: ‘we are less required to function as critics who excavate and assess what has already occurred, and more and more pushed to adopt a stance of experimental researchers, opening to what can be learned from what is happening on the ground’ (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink 2010:342). This allows for, as Gibson-Graham (1994) suggest, a problematising of knowledge—what constitutes it and who knows it.

The notion of research as a performative practice is gaining momentum (Law & Urry 2004) with the realisation that all research, in one way or another, contributes to shaping the world and creating reality. Cameron et al. (2010:3) use a performative framing in order to conduct research in a way that ‘might help and craft a particular reality – a network of community gardens that are able to support each other’. They continue that structuring their research in this way means that community gardens are positioned as ‘experiments, as ongoing works-in-process, that can be altered and adjusted in response not just to changed circumstance but to changed understandings’ (Cameron et al. 2010:12). In doing so, they stress the need for scholars to be conscious of their constitutive role in producing the worlds in which we live.

Gibson-Graham (2008:618) note that becoming an experimental researcher may be problematic for some social scientists, given that many of us are trained to be ‘discerning, detached and critical so that we can penetrate the veil of common understanding and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern the phenomenal world’. In other words, some scholars may find it difficult to move away from the ‘paranoid practices of critique and mastery’ (Sedgwick 2003; Gibson-Graham 2008) or the ‘judging frame’ (Cameron et al. 2010), both of which tend to amplify what is wrong with the world and why progressive possibilities are unattainable. In other words, a social scientist must still be suspicious of power relations—this is one of our roles, as conscience and critic of society—yet also offer possibilities for positive change.

One of the ways scholars are able to highlight the role they play in producing the very worlds they are researching is through critical and reflexive forms of engagement. Feminists, in particular, have highlighted the value and power-laden content of positionality and have shown that research is an embodied practice (England 1994; Longhurst 1997; Rose 1997). Our bodies—gender, sex, race, age, class, size, appearance, comportment and so on—affect the research encounter and our interpretation of it. A critical analysis of the various roles and subject positions we take up in different times and different spaces as well as an awareness of how it feels to enact particular positionalities enable researchers to begin to talk from an embodied location, rather than from an observational distance.

Maxey (1999) attempts to engage with notions of activism and reflexivity as they are played out within the research process. As he recognises, being situated within both the spaces of academia and activism can be problematic, but the issues can be resolved through the process of reflexivity and recognition that academic and activist roles are fluid, not separate. He suggests that we are all engaged in the process of activism as we live our daily lives, and, through engaged critical reflexivity, this can be realised and situated in relation to academic roles. Fuller (1999) describes the experiences of repositioning his academic identity from detached observer of credit union development to activist identity as an active union member committed to aiding successful development. He illustrates how maintaining a critical, multi-positioned identity can be a beneficial reflexive learning experience for researchers and can enrich the research process. Meanwhile, Hubbard (1999) explores the potentials and pitfalls of adopting an activist role in research with a relatively ‘hidden’ and stigmatised group—female sex workers. He concludes by emphasising that ‘every researcher needs to interrogate their own positionality to decide how they can best make a contribution to debates surrounding the oppression of excluded groups’ and maintains that the activist/researcher role is not always an easy one to adopt (Hubbard 1999:197). We recognise the fluid, partial and contingent nature of our embodied subjectivities and believe that by actively engaging and critically reflecting on our place(s) in the world we are more able to perform research in creative and constructive ways that resist rather than reinforce dominating power structures.

All of us share the view that collaborative research should be engaged, embodied, relevant, non-hierarchical, based on mutual respect, reciprocal, and action-based. We seek to move beyond simply a critique of oppressive power relations towards the construction of new knowledge that enhances understandings of difference, diversity and mutuality. An experimental research approach is therefore useful because it searches for possibilities and opportunities for creating alternatives and therefore offers much potential for understanding further university-community collaborations.

Collaborative methods

As noted at the outset of this article, our ideas about collaboration stem from involvement with BRCSS. A team of social science researchers at the University of Waikato initiated a series of interactive critical reflections to interrogate the role of collaboration in the construction of knowledge in the social sciences at the University of Waikato. We aimed to make explicit the ways in which relationships—between researchers, organisations, community groups and participants—not only are shaped by, but also shape the politics of knowledge creation. The aim of the project was to bring together scholars at a range of levels, from emerging, mid-career and established researchers and with varying disciplinary background, in order to discuss the question: ‘how and in what ways does the concept of collaboration assist (or not) social science practice at the University of Waikato?’ The team invited social science researchers from the University of Waikato and beyond to reflect on their ‘highs and lows’ of collaborative research. Invited speakers participated in and led the seminar sessions. They discussed their experiences in relation to the following themes:

1.	What is collaborative research?
2.	When does inter-disciplinary research work?
3.	What might be ‘new’ thinking on collaboration?

We targeted specific areas of interest to the members of our team, and where possible opened up debates about indigenous, gender, immigration and migrant experiences. We prioritised the topics: international collaborations, working with community groups, action research, community development/migrant and Pacific research and studies of culture and society.

The methodology used in the project was innovative. We used participant observation to document the seminar proceedings. Invited speakers spoke for approximately 15 minutes and then opened the floor for discussion. Consent to video and audio-record digitally was gained from invited speakers and seminar attendees and these recordings were transcribed verbatim by Carey-Ann. Transcriptions and digital recordings form the data for analysis.

The seminar which forms the basis for this article is the second seminar, entitled ‘Community Collaboration’. This seminar was held on Friday 1 October 2010. Lynda, Jenny and Yvonne offered insights into their community collaborative projects. Lynda spoke to the notion of ‘Queering Community Collaboration’. She used material from her involvement in and with the queer community group ‘Hamilton Pride’ in order to examine the emotional politics of collaboration. Situated with scholarship on activist geographies (Kitchin & Hubbard 1999; Pain 2003), and in particular queer activist geographies (Brown 2007; Brown & Knopp 2008), Lynda examined World AIDS Day activist examples to highlight the affects and emotions generated by political organising.

Jenny, from the University of Waikato's Management School, spoke to the theme of ‘Working between Worldviews’. She described close to a decade of research done with the Waitakere Pacific Board and five of the nine Pacific communities in the area. With permission of the participants, a synthesis of the research syntheses became a PhD (Cave 2009a). This ‘work’ was collaborative action research (Oja & Smulyan 1989) carried out as a social constructionist partnership (Potter 1996) that systematically and iteratively responded to the community's agendas. It began as a developmental project to design a highly interactive and commercial tourism attraction but shifted over time to research the factors within families, communities and Pacific culture that inhibit and enable cultural enterprise (such as tourism) (Cave et al. 2003). A steering group of Pacific elders oversaw the work, specifying a set of principles to guide its progress and approving project plans.

The collaboration was informed by notions of habitus (values, internal structures, goals) (Bourdieu & Wacqant 1999) and Otherness. However, the multiple culture, multi-sited nature of this Pacific diasporan research meant that from the outset it was situated in a ‘between worlds’ framework (Gegeo 2001; Hviding 2003), but grounded in both Pacific and Western academic thinking about the need to create open but bounded spaces within which to dialogue across and within cultures. She talked in the session about the practice of the research collaboration, its theoretical base, as well as the collective identity and a new way to achieve mutual understanding that developed within the work.

Yvonne joined us from the University of Auckland and BRCSS supported her visit. Drawing on her involvement in various groups such as the aforementioned DAWN and the Feminist Dialogues with the World Social Forum, she spoke about ‘Feminism, Development and Collaboration’. For Yvonne, collaborative research requires a shared feminist ethics of practice, which is a way of working collaboratively within a feminist epistemology (Moss 2002; Monk et al. 2003; Moss & Falconer Al-Hindi 2008). Mutual respect and recognition of differences and a commitment to non-hierarchical modes of organisation and to processes of intergenerational transfers of knowledge and power are the key principles of a shared feminist ethics of practice. Yvonne then talked about how this theoretical framing has played out in some places and spaces in which she has collaborated. In what follows we use examples from our research—which coalesced in our seminar series—to highlight the construction of new collective identities (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink 2010) that are formed when we cross university/community boundaries.

Crossing university/community boundaries

I (Lynda) want to offer some reflections on my researcher/activist role. I highlight my part in producing activism with the queer community group Hamilton Pride. I have been a committee member of Hamilton Pride since September 2007 and it is with this group's consent (plus ethical approval from my university) that I am conducting research on ‘queer’ feelings of belonging in and to place. I attend (and often chair) our meetings, help plan and run events and social activities. What I write about is from our collective events from within the Hamilton Pride community group. The ideas presented in this article have developed in dialogue with other activists and university colleagues, yet the observations and analyses are my own. For many years I have been involved in feminist and queer organisations, and over the last 15 years have focused on Pride parades and festivals. As a poststructuralist feminist geographer I have moved away from dichotomising discourses towards an ambivalent and sometimes contradictory liminal state.

For several years now Hamilton Pride members have been active in promoting gender and sexual diversity, raising awareness about the prevention of HIV transmission, and we all have a desire to build and sustain healthy communities. World AIDS Day (1 December) is an important date in our activist calendar on which we run workshops about HIV/AIDS, have a public queer presence in Hamilton, and remember loved ones who have passed away. In combining these goals, in 2009 we had a successful public participation art project in Hamilton's CBD. People had the opportunity to share stories, talk about HIV/AIDS, donate funds, and create art about living positively with HIV and/or remember loved ones who had died from AIDs-related illnesses. This ‘Art from the Heart’ performance art project was created by many—Hamilton Pride, a group of crafters with radical leanings called ‘Fairly Crafty’, the YWCA and art students from a local high school. We offered people cardboard cutout red hearts and the opportunity to decorate and write messages thereon. Hearts were placed in the ground, transforming Garden Place with a sea of red hearts (Fig. 1).

Figure 1  Art from the Heart project, Garden Place, Hamilton. Source: image by Lynda Johnston.

I had taken this ‘Art from the Heart’ idea to our Hamilton Pride group. It had been suggested to me by an Australian geographer, Gordon Waitt, who had seen a similar event in Sydney. I was motivated by the opportunity to transform Hamilton's central lunchtime leisure space—Garden Place—and in doing so challenge the heteronormativity of Hamilton. Existing research tells us that Pride events—this WAD event and others—are often understood as a way to contest social and cultural norms and temporally disrupt taken-for-granted codes and affect cultural change (Bell & Valentine 1995; Browne 2007; Johnston 2005; Sharpe 2008). We felt that we had disrupted the normative down-town space of Hamilton. Our seminar series, plus writing this article collaboratively, has made me realise that from my advantageous place in the academy I can engage in performative social and political actions, mobilise my resources and support the co-creation of knowledges and spaces (Gibson-Graham 2008). Working with people who are already making alternative worlds does not mean abandoning the academy all together. Gibson-Graham (2008:626) see ‘the academy as an advantageous place from which to perform other worlds and illustrate the ways in which performative social experiments can be engaged in by hybrid research collectivities, including but not limited to academics’. They make the point that as university-based scholars we are well placed to ‘mobilise the resources to support the co-creation of knowledges, create the networks necessary to spread these knowledges, work with activists and academics of the future, and foster an environment where new facts can survive’ (Gibson-Graham 2008:629).

This highly successful WAD event produced an affective economy that facilitated collaborative and ethical relations between me and several community groups, allowing the formation of new collective identities in Hamilton. Links were made through the diversity of those who took part—people living with HIV, local politicians, high-school art students, artists, volunteers, academics and members of Hamilton's lunchtime public who stopped to consider the hearts, and take part. We were surprised by some reactions. Some young people asked ‘what's AIDs?’, reinforcing our decision to hold the public art event. There was an openness and ease to the public art event that allowed us to shift the stigma often associated with people living with HIV. Being open to learning from what is happening on the ground and in ‘the wild’ necessarily entails acknowledging research as a performative practice. To perform research is to perform activism: ‘theory has taken on a new relation to action – to understand the world is to change it. As a performative practice: academic research is activism; it participates in bringing new realities into being’ (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink 2009:342). The Art from the Heart collaboration facilitated new ways of thinking about people, HIV/AIDs and public space. It furthered the aims of the community group Hamilton Pride, and in doing so enabled the joint construction of a hybrid research collective.

I (Jenny), like Lynda, respond to community, not necessarily academic, agendas. I spent 10 years collaborating with Pacific migrant communities for social and economic redress through tourism development. Some of my roles include ‘volunteer researcher’ and ‘indigenous cultures attractions developer’ for the Waitakere Pacific Board. These roles evolved over time, as did my status from an ‘outsider’ to an ‘insider’ who was increasingly drawn to the heart of the issues in which we were advocating social and economic equity on behalf of Pacific communities. Our collaboration began as a business-oriented analysis of tourism products and potential consumers, in the context of multiple ethnic-specific, trans-local migrant social worlds and socio-economic marginality. It shifted, however, to an emic, internal view of the enablers and inhibitors of cultural enterprise, drawn initially from the nascent entrepreneurs in nine communities and affirmed in-depth with five wider communities.

Cultural and linguistic boundaries of researchers and respondents are bridged when one uses a ‘between worlds’ episteme ideology, or worldview. The concept of ‘mutuality’ was developed within the collaboration (as a method, methodology and research design) to achieve this and to embed the research process and outcomes in Oceanic values, as had been specified by the steering group. The values (or principles) were: collaboration, inclusiveness at all levels, Pacific voice, cultural resonance, elder's ownership, community affirmation and research reciprocity, as well as dual excellence in cultural knowledge and research methods (Cave 2009b). The method co-constructs knowledge, first within each ethnicity and then across them, offering non-adversarial challenge to each perspective. Thus, the researchers, each ethnic community and elders comment on the meanings that the other(s) ascribe to the context, means of observation, process protocols and analyses from their respective cultural points of view. The method retains the integrity of each point of view (disagreements, unresolved issues and agreements) and yet constructs new meaning between the research participants. New meanings flow forward into the re-analysis of the original data and into subsequent questions. Kiribati, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu communities engaged with the project in depth, completing five studies in total. Each community owned its data and no editing of transcripts was done until permission had been given. The data was synthesised and the results were returned to each community for review and revision. The ethnic representatives of the Waitakere Pacific Board reviewed their community's synthesis for accuracy before it was included in the thesis.

The next step was to seek Pacific and Anglo-European research methodologies in which to ground such principles. At that time I found several, constituted in ethnic-specific metaphors. They were ‘teu le va’ (creating a space between) (‘Anae 2007), ‘vaa/wah’ (metaphorical space between cultures) (Helu-Thaman 2002) and the Extended ‘Kakala’ (garland or wreath) (Johansson Fua et al. 2008).

Reflecting on this community collaboration—post seminar and during the course of writing of this article—I have identified four key outcomes. First, I cannot stress enough the importance of establishing a way to develop, challenge and refine core questions for each study from each collaborator's perspective. Second, the project had to be flexible enough to span governance, research team and community levels. Third, the project team was made up of multilingual Pacific researchers and an academic who ‘led from behind’ rather than standing in front. Fourth, a network of feedback was crucial with each participant community presenting results, bilingually where possible, with written summaries. These summaries were used to lobby local government and continue to assist economic development for Pacific communities.

Our interactive approach meant that each community group, plus me as a University scholar, came together to reflect upon and discuss tourism development in order to sustain Pacific communities in Waitakere. We contributed our expertise, knowledges and experiences to collectively produce new possibilities—and identities—that could be accessed by policy makers as well as entrepreneurs (Gibson-Graham 2008; Cameron et al. 2010). In thinking back on this experience, I was an experimental researcher willing to change my role in the production of knowledge—I learnt from the ground up (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink 2010). Knowledge was produced by all of us, rather than solely in the academy.

I (Yvonne) was actively engaged with DAWN prior to entering the formal spaces of the academy. Motivated by frustration over abysmal attempts to address gender inequality in the Pacific, a strong sense of social justice and a commitment to sharing feminist analysis, I worked both at the international level and in the Pacific region. My international work included supporting research-informed advocacy on issues such as political restructuring and social transformation (see Taylor 2000) at the United Nations Special Session of the General Assembly on the World Summit on Social Development Conference in Geneva in 2000; the ‘marked body’ at the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) in 2001 (see DAWN Informs Nov 2001); and the notion of subaltern counter publics at the World Social Forum especially through the 3rd International Feminist Dialogues in 2007. These global spaces required a nuanced conceptually informed analysis of key issues which were cognisant of the global development context in which they would unfold. This analysis was informed further by insights from participants at these global events from all regions in the developing world. Working at such an abstract level when, on a daily basis, women's inequality is devastatingly evident and regularly leads to tragic consequences is challenging. Yet, increasingly more respect is now given to this kind of feminist advocacy because of the recognition that ‘the struggles for interpretive power are not struggles to get the language and representations right for their own sake, but because they are a critical part in the determination of policy’ (Cornwell et al. 2007:17).

While I support progressive feminist analysis at the global level, I continue to be informed by insights from my place in the Pacific. In my particular case, as a mobile Pacific Islander (over the time I worked with DAWN I lived in Port Moresby, Apia, Bonn, Brussels, Canberra and Auckland) I developed a close working relationship with feminist organisations in the Pacific—especially the Fiji Women's Rights Movement (FWRM). They continue work to remove discrimination against women mostly through institutional reforms, yet they also recognise the need for intergenerational transfers of analysis and values. Taking guidance from DAWN's Global Training Institutes (see http://www.dawnnet.org/training-institutes.php), to which I contributed as a member of the DAWN Steering Committee, and other feminist activists we ran two Regional Training Programmes on feminist advocacy in the Pacific, one in 2005 in Fiji and the other in 2008 in Papua New Guinea. DAWN's collective analysis (http://www.dawnnet.org/research-analyses.php) formed the core of our Regional Training Programmes which we shared with younger women activists in the Pacific so they could better understand how local and global processes were connected. We worked with DAWN's core research themes of the political economy of globalisation, political restructuring and social transformation, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the political ecology and sustainability. This analytical framework drew on the intellectual ability of participants, their material realities of insufficiency and injustice, and their skills as community activists. Throughout this work a shared feminist ethics of practice developed, the core features of which were mutual respect and recognition of differences, commitment to non-hierarchical modes of organisation and an obligation to active processes of intergenerational transfers of knowledge.

A similar approach was taken when a colleague and I were involved with The Whānau Development Project of Te Runanga o Te Rarawa in the far north of New Zealand (Underhill-Sem & Lewis 2008). We entered the project in an unusual way but were keen to introduce what we considered an emancipatory intellectual framework derived from feminist economic geography (Gibson-Graham 2005) and which looked promising in indigenous international development (Laurie et al. 2005). Although we are not Māori and not directly ‘of the place’, our contingent connections and our intellectual contribution provided valuable momentum towards a successful project that delivered new knowledge at a crucial time. This was not without complications and discomfort for a number of people (Henwood & Harris 2007) but a shared commitment to community collaboration contributed to the advancement of the political aims of Te Runanga o Te Rarawa.

We—Lynda, Jenny and Yvonne—provide these examples of working with, and sometimes being, the ‘other’—queer, Pasifika, Māori. It is clear that people in these groups are, at times and in different places, marginalised. Each of our research examples shows that working with community groups—in which interdependence is a key value—is transformative.

Conclusions

Each of us conducted our collaborative research hopeful that our projects would, in some way, make a positive change as well as challenge normative knowledge producing practices. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), in her book Touching Feeling, illuminates the boundaries that we all tread. She asks scholars to be open to a reparative stance that makes space for hope, expands possibilities, and refuses to know too much. Rather than being suspicious and dismissive social scientists, the reparative stance allows us to be receptive and hospitable, inspired to care for the world and its inhabitants (Gibson-Graham 2006).

As researchers who cross academic/community boundaries, we found ways to conduct hybrid research. In our seminar presentations and during the course of writing this article we have focused on the possibilities of hybrid research collectivities. There are many stories to be told about the difficulties of these relationships too, when, for example, some emotions are deemed ‘out of place’ for performative action research (Wilkinson 2009). Yet we remain hopeful and argue that there is much to gain for researchers open to community-based research projects. For Lynda this meant using academic resources—theoretical knowledges, experience in senior administration roles, a solid platform of research into queer geographies—and creative ways to meld this experience into WAD public art performance in down-town Hamilton. Jenny commits substantial amounts of time to her community research. The 10-year partnership with Waitakere Pacific communities enabled her to assist with building a community economy, in which sustenance and interdependence were key values. Jenny's hybrid research collective established further alliances, and networks. Similarly, Yvonne's feminist approach to her research collaborations was centred on an emancipatory intellectual framework. Her many years of experience working with DAWN enabled her to move to less familiar spaces, such as Te Runanga o Te Rarawa, and maintain integrity with her iwi partners. We all had transformative moments.

Our actions—sometimes small, sometimes substantial—plus the established networks arising from these actions can be seen to have greater impact. In thinking through our projects we are very aware that theory takes on a new relation to action. Our performative practice helps establish new knowledge and new ways of being (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2009) so that we are both objects and subjects of our research. We all understand that our role as academics has changed dramatically– from being critics to experimental researchers willing to learn from what is happening to people in our communities. What we hope we have achieved during these moments of collective reflection is to encourage more scholars to cross boundaries in order to expand and multiply hybrid research collectives, and thereby effect positive social change at many levels.

Notes

1. ‘JK Gibson-Graham’ is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham (1945–2010), feminist political economists and economic geographers based at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, respectively.