Timely and Sensitive Information: Navigating Fieldwork Challenges in Community Research

Background/Purpose: Collaborative research between social work scholars and community organizations can strengthen the impacts of both research and practice. However, genuinely attuning our positionality to the work of community advocates, or, as the conference theme suggests, “grounding our research in the lived experiences of people impacted by problems and those working tirelessly to address these problems,” can uncover tensions in the collaborative process. This is particularly so when “collaboration” entails both practice and research in politically-charged settings (e.g., in community advocacy or community organizing campaigns). I identify and analyze tensions in a budding research project with housing advocates in a large midwestern urban center and discuss how I am navigating ongoing ethical and political tensions arising from my involvement in an advocacy campaign.

Methods: This practice and research reflection is based on a community embedded research project with organizations focused on housing advocacy in a large midwestern urban city. Much of the reflection comes from an analysis of my positionality and involvement as both researcher and practitioner, a duality that is hard to reconcile due to the conflicting political economies of knowledge production involved in my fieldwork.

Results: Two main areas of collaborative tension are explored. The first deals with the vastly different materialities (and therefore temporalities) under which researchers and practitioners co-create knowledge. While various forms of practice and research knowledge exist, I point to how the timeline under which the “generalizable knowledge” process of university human subjects offices operate disallow certain forms of collaboration with community organizations. Indeed, advocates working within the temporalities of city or state politics might not be able to afford to wait for institutional review board approvals. The second area deals with the tensions in the co-creation of political knowledge between researchers and practitioners – knowledge and information, in this case, that community groups deem time-, subject-, or strategically-sensitive. Indeed, I argue that political knowledge is sensitive in part due to the temporal aspects of advocacy and mobilization.

Conclusions/Implications: I pursued different strategies in navigating the two areas of collaborative tension mentioned above. Firstly, in dealing with the temporal limitations of human subject approval, I opted to position myself fully as a practitioner (rather than a researcher) by contributing to various forms of community knowledge production (e.g., the development of surveys and focus groups) with the understanding and resignation that any resulting products and data could not be used for academic publishing. In regards to the second collaborative tension dealing with sensitive political information in, for example, interviews, I proposed a protocol through which my interlocutors and I could assess the sensitive nature of the data. While this is an ongoing negotiation, it has allowed me to continue conducting research in a setting that might otherwise have been closed off completely.