Before the Protocol: Acompañamiento As a Pre-Design Methodological Orientation In a Binational Research–Practice Partnership

Background: Community-engaged research is often presented as beginning with a defined study design followed by stakeholder participation. In practice, however, many partnerships emerge through sustained relational engagement that precedes formal research planning yet remains undertheorized as a methodological process in its own right. As a result, what counts as rigorous community-engaged research narrows to protocols and procedures, rendering less visible the slower work of trust-building, mutual learning, and epistemic negotiation through which genuine partnerships become possible. This paper examines how acompañamiento, or the act of “walking alongside,” “standing with,” and “doing with” others in mutual support and solidarity, functioned as the relational foundation through which a binational research–practice partnership among Programa Casa Refugiados, a refugee-serving organization in Mexico City, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and the University of Houston emerged and through which research priorities were negotiated collaboratively across partners.

Methods: This analysis draws on seven years of embedded collaboration (2018–present) during which binational academic researchers engaged in acompañamiento alongside humanitarian staff and refugees through participatory evaluation activities, refugee listening sessions, and education-for-peace initiatives. Rather than beginning with a predefined research protocol, researchers came to understand organizational processes, service practices, and refugee trajectories through sustained relational presence over time. Data sources include reflexive field notes, analytic memos, and partnership meeting records generated throughout this collaboration. These materials were examined through a reflexive, process-oriented analytic approach attentive to how research questions, governance structures, and conceptual frameworks emerged within processes of acompañamiento. This analysis traced how acompañamiento shaped the formation of the partnership across phases of collaboration, particularly through shifts in interpretive authority and priority-setting within the partnership.

Results: Across phases of collaboration, acompañamiento served as the methodological pathway through which the partnership and its research agenda became possible. First, walking alongside practitioners and refugees produced situated understanding of how knowledge is produced within humanitarian practice and how learning unfolds through everyday institutional navigation. Second, this relational engagement supported the identification of acompañamiento itself as a central analytic construct emerging from practice rather than a predefined topic of inquiry. Third, sustained collaboration contributed to the development of horizontal governance structures that redistributed interpretive authority and positioned displaced persons and practitioners as epistemic partners in defining research priorities. Together, these relational processes generated the foundation for a multilevel learning ecology framework linking refugee, organizational, and researcher learning.

Conclusions and Implications: Conceptualizing acompañamiento as a pre-design methodological orientation makes visible how community-engaged research partnerships emerge through relational processes prior to formal study implementation. By demonstrating how walking alongside practitioners and refugees in Mexico City shaped both the partnership and its analytic framework, this paper contributes a methodological account of democratic knowledge production aligned with social work's commitment to epistemic equity. The analysis offers a transferable insight for research–practice partnerships—particularly in the Global South and other under-resourced contexts where relational trust precedes and exceeds any single funded study—showing how practitioners and community members can be positioned as co-producers of knowledge from the outset rather than participants recruited after study design is complete.