Weaving Relational Accountability: A Workshop on Building Indigenist Relational Ethics and Approaches for Participatory Research

Indigenist and decolonizing research methodologies are participatory research practices that seek to advance the self-determination of Indigenous communities by uplifting and centering their desires, epistemologies, ontologies, and ways of knowing. As methodologies, they offer social work researchers valuable skills and practices for conducting anti-oppressive, community-engaged, and action-based research that can lead to transformative solutions to their experiences of social and health inequity. These research methodologies rely on practices of relational accountability– values and actions centered on relationality, responsibility, respect, reciprocity, and the interconnectedness that social work researchers have with the communities they come from and/or the communities that they work in collaboration with – to empower Indigenous dreams and desires towards transformative action through research. Building a practice of relational accountability aligns itself with feminist, qualitative, and participatory research practices of researcher standpoint, insider/outsider dynamics, positionality, and critical reflexivity. This workshop seeks to guide researchers through a practice of weaving these practices together to develop a research practice of relational accountability through skills to reflect, claim, and refine relational ethics and commitments as a praxis for anti-oppressive social work research.

Facilitators of this session are two Indigenous Pasifika scholars from Guahan and American Samoa who work closely with Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities in Washington state using Indigenist Collaborative Research and Participatory Research methodologies. With their experience training, social work researchers in Indigenist and community-engaged research, they will guide participants through several activities aimed to understand the relationships between their positionality, reflexivity, and values as they are applied within their research. These activities will include the following: 1) A guided positionality reflection and standpoint mapping activity involving critical self-reflection on target and agent ranks (Nieto & Boyer, 2006), Insider/outsider status (Mason-Bish, 2018), and positionality mapping exercise built from Jackson et al’s (2024) contributions on critical feminist positionality practice. 2) A facilitated group discussion on personal values that emerge from this and other reflections on researcher’s lived experiences, standpoint, and social justice commitments and where they see these values aligning or misaligning with their research practices. 3) A critical arts based inquiry activity responding to questions about relational accountability to build and reflect on the relational responsibility researchers have to the communities they are a part of or serve and orient themselves towards a research practice grounded in relational accountability is within their respective social work research and practice. This workshop welcomes researchers and practitioners at all levels who have both advanced experience in participatory and Indigenist research methodologies, and those who are beginning their research careers in the field of social work.

This workshop also hopes to connect researchers seeking to do anti-oppressive research in the field with one another, seeking to build community around shared values and commitments to participatory and Indigenist research.