Cindy Peltier, associate professor and chair of indigenous education at the University of Nipissing, describes this as “helicopter research. “People would come in and take information and publish anything they wanted without ever talking to the community,” she says. “People thought that this attractive audience was indigenous.” (These issues are still very relevant today: Currently, tribal countries in the U.S. are refusing to participate in a gathering program DNA of National Institutes of Health due to concerns over control of their genetic data.)
Research that is meaningless for its subjects tends to cause obesity – especially if the level of research is high and the number of potential participants is small. As a result, minority communities are particularly vulnerable. So not only trans and indigenous study participants, but also rural residents, people with rare diseases, and refugees, among others, who grow tired of serving as guinea pigs are -again for high-minded academic studies. “Research weakness is an issue where the breadth of public interest outweighs the ability of local actors to respond to it,” said Julia Haggerty, associate professor of geography at State University. Montana which studies the impact of energy development on rural cities.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons to want to learn about marginalized communities. Medical researchers hope to develop treatments and cures for rare diseases; sociologists and anthropologists may expect to use their work to publicize knowledge about under-represented groups, or to develop direct policies. But this latter goal, in particular, is not always realistic. “With marginalized organizations, there is a lot of public interest in the practice of policy, and academic researchers then fly in and think they are going to solve these problems. And then nothing happens and nothing changes for those people, ”said Tom Clark, a professor of sociology at the University of Sheffield who wrote an influential early paper on research fatigue. “Really get it [research] it is difficult to policy and practice. “A wide range of studies are sitting on shelves without affecting the outside world – what Clark calls the society’s research suction.” ”
Clark and others agree that, to avoid research fatigue, academics need to consider the desires and needs of the people they study. One approach is participatory action analysis, in which community members are trained to participate in the research process – not as subjects, but as researchers themselves. To really benefit the community, Peltier believes, these colleagues can’t just collect and analyze data or help demonstrate the end results. “Any participatory study, or research that claims to be participatory, should involve discussions with the community from the outset to consider who the partnership will be about. similar research, ”she said.
When Peltier students work with indigenous communities, she encourages them to bring together not only an academic committee, but also a group of advisors from that community who will help guide their research from the very beginning. . With buy-in from the community, this approach works well, she said. “Indigenous people deserve far more than a chair at the decision-making table,” said Peltier, who has her own affiliation with both the Nipissing First Nation and the Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. “I think they have to be decisions about what research looks like and what it is designed to achieve.”
But this level of participation may not always be possible. “Not all community engagement needs to look the same,” says Haggerty. “And researchers don’t have to promise to deliver something that they’re not going to deliver. But what we want is for researchers to at least take that step forward. ”