Humility for Collaboration (Saying yes to interdependence)
Collaboration is the focus for October 2022 on SAGE Methodspace. The value of friendship is a point often missing in discussions of collaboration. Particularly when we are working remotely, we need trusted colleagues who can share both personal and professional sides of our lives. Natalia and I met when organizing a Methodspace webinar, Research Ethics in Practice, with Cheryl Poth. We both appreciate the friendship and exchange that has ensued. This post by Natalia is in response to my post, Interdependence Benefits Independent Scholars. - Janet Salmons
Connecting across the Miles
By Natalia Reinoso Chávez
Natalia Reinoso Chávez is an independent researcher, a Psychologist with a Master's degree in Education and Cultural Diversity. She is the Intercultural Education coordinator in the Intercultural Medical Study Center -Centro de Estudios Médicos Interculturales- in Colombia.
As a curious researcher, I like to observe how others live the research journey inside and outside academia. I have also had my own experiences, and yes: from a critical pedagogy perspective, we know how academia can be not only lonely but deadly competitive. However, I have also found people inside and outside academia with whom to share curiosity, collaboration, equity, and kindness as forefront values to guide the fascinating knowledge production process.
I didn’t imagine that Janet Salmons –qualitative and online research SAGE Methods guru– could be, as she says, a friend with whom to learn with me – a Colombian woman building herself as an independent scholar and researcher. As we share in the NVivo conference video below, collaborating across borders is now possible more than ever. It is an opportunity to connect and nurture our research paths from different perspectives and broader experiences. My students and I have expanded the scope of online qualitative research by enjoying Janet´s online visits, and I have gained new questions about collaboration and its relation to cultural humility, in which I have been training myself and my students for the last 7 years. We came to share our insights about journaling in our lives and projects, and we already know there is more to come.
As Janet highlights, collaborating and learning together is vital for independent scholars, even more having a history of resistance in this field due to class, gender, race, formal education, capabilities, or other diversities. From this experience, I have also learned that collaboration expands as a snowball strategy because it has a life of its own. For example, I have to thank another independent scholar and researcher, Dr. Helen Kara, for introducing us and sharing her knowledge about independent research. And it was thanks to Janet I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Cheryl Poth, with whom I still have projects to come true about Ethics and Cultural humility.
Building alliances is central to collaboration, and there could be multiple challenges while working together across borders. For instance, how do we find common ground? In our book Punto de Encuentro, my colleague Laura Fonseca, our students, and I reflected on peacebuilding and our own experience of building alliances within a community of former guerrilla members in the Colombian Amazon. We emphasized the central role of reflexivity and developing consciousness about our own sociocultural identities and differences, being open to getting to know and learning from each other.
In another experience described in Kara´s and Koo volume, Researching in the age of Covid-19, working with psychosocial professionals who assist forced displaced indigenous and Afro-Colombian victims, it is clear that it always works better to be humble with others, willing to build together better solutions based on each other’s strengths, and always recognizing each other knowledge and expertise. Therefore, as we concluded with Cheryl Poth in our webinar, Cultural Humility can be an ethical principle in our collaborative relationships.
There will always be challenges in collaboration between academic colleges from different disciplines, or with the institutions and communities we make alliances with. But, as I have enjoyed in this friendship, the challenges are minimized with genuine caring relationships that embrace creativity, and the same reflexivity and accountability involved in cultural humility.
More Methodspace Posts about Collaboration
Learning while doing: collaborating on a book about collaboration.