Positionality, relationality, place, and land: Considerations for ethical research with communities

Abstract

Attention to researcher positionality is an important component of qualitative research, particularly in research done with and for communities. However, discussions of researcher positionality are often limited in that they narrowly focus on positionality with respect to human research participants and whether the researcher is an insider or outsider. In this article, I build with the contributions of Indigenous scholarship to make a methodological argument for broadening our notions of positionality to consider relationality with respect to place and land. Relationality is a core tenet across many Indigenous epistemologies and research methodologies, and refers to the interconnected and mutually constitutive relationships between people and land. I argue that building and participating in relationships with land—as a core methodological consideration in qualitative research—can catalyze new possibilities for ethical research in which researchers are answerable to complex social and ecological relations in the places where they live and work.