Trust+and+Qual+Research

Social In/justice in the "Dog & Pony Show": Trust and Qualitative Research Penny A. Pasque, University of Oklahoma Paper Presented in Symposium @ ASHE: November 17, 2011, 2:15-3:30pm

Colleges and universities need to play an instrumental role in researching and addressing myriad issues facing the world today including educational and economic inequities, health care, the environment (land, air, and sea), incarceration rates, drug and human trafficking, food and water sustainability, and other issues of social in/justice (Pasque, 2010a). Yet, without trust as a foundational element in collaborative research relationships between communities and universities, I argue that true social change will not be fostered. Milner ((2007) argues that especially in the case of research involving issues of identity, "when researchers are not mindful of the enormous role of their own and others' racialized positionality and cultural ways of knowing, the results can be dangerous to communities and individuals of color" (sic - and to everyone involved) (p. 388). A community partner in a study I was involved with reflects on this relationship as he passionately speaks to a gathering of approximately 150 university presidents, legislators, faculty, administrators, national association representatives, students, and community partners. He states,

"Real [community-university] relationships mean, not that we come to do 'show and tell' and 'dog and pony shows' about 'you want to give us some money'; it means sittin' down and saying, 'these are what we're wrestling with, this is what we're failing against, this is what we're trying to do differently.' ... And, //then// we can begin to talk about what needs to be done together." (cited in Pasque, 2010b, p. 295)

Conversations about trust and explorations of power dynamics within relationships (in graduate classrooms and beyond) remain all too uncommon within education scholarship, thus limiting the transformative potential of the field itself. This symposium - and by extension this part of the WIKI site - asks us all to engage in dialogue about the following questions (and to add additional questions): In what ways do our research initiatives perpetuate dominant paradigms within the academy? In what ways may graduate students, teachers of qualitative research, and researchers become cognizant of the complexities in relationships between researchers and community members before establishing / as we establish a research design? Are the roles between researcher and community members necessarily mutually exclusive? What are the ways to talk about the importance of trust, power, working-the-hyphen (Fine, 1994) and dangers in qualitative research (Milner, 2007) in the graduate student classroom? What are the ways to engage in dialogue about these concepts in participant - researcher relationships?