Building an effective community research collaboration

The research collaboration is centered on the work of Tkà:nios, an intergenerational collective of Kahnawake community members working to reawaken traditional Haudenosaunee ways of life by nurturing local foodways and advancing food sovereignty. With the support of SHIFT, they are engaged in a collaboration with researchers at the Centre for Engineering in Society to develop technical plans for physical infrastructure (e.g. community kitchen, seed bank, learning pavilion) that will provide a long-term home for their work in Kahnawake.  

Throughout the event, several ingredients for an effective community research collaboration emerged. Here’s what we took away from the discussion:  

Embeddedness 

For Tkà:nios, this research collaboration is just one aspect of the heart work they are doing within the Kahnawake community. Described by Govind as a “community-led technology development project”, the research engages capstone engineering students to develop physical infrastructure plans that take shape from the community’s vision for an agri-food hub. Tkà:nios holds this physical infrastructure as a central and long-term goal, in complement to their current work organizing a community garden and land-based learning workshops that breathe new life into ancestral ways. 

This context means that the research develops in parallel with the Tkà:nios collective’s other activities, enabling mutually reinforcing exchange between academica and community members. 

Respect and humility 

In a strong community-university research collaboration, everyone brings an expertise and perspective that both complements and contrasts the others. In this partnership, for example, while Brooke is the driving force holding the vision and history of Tkà:nios in Kahnawake, Govind offered a careful understanding of the limitations, and importantly, opportunities of working within an academic institution. 

While each speaker brought their own gifts and expertise to the room, they were careful to highlight each other and the importance of collaboration. They reminded us that humility and respect are necessary to see and work across knowledges. For Govind, one expression of this needs for humility came in a call to loosen academic restraints to allow for research to develop with community and to be relational in nature. Though he was clear in saying that academic institutions are not the villain, he called on researchers to embody strategies of humility and experiment with how things might be done differently. His contributions invited us into a willingness to question and expand what can be offered and learned in the context of academic research collaborations. 

"Tough skin"

While emphasizing the values of respect and humility, panelists made clear that engaging with community in this way means reckoning with a multitude of opinions. Opinions which never fully align with one approach. Because of this, community work can require a “tough skin”. Panelists recognized the complexity of navigating a variety of community voices as a challenging but necessary part of building collaborative change. 

Flexibility

Elena shared that the background research on comparable Indigenous-led organizations across North America faced some hurdles that challenged a traditional scholarly approach, including organizations do not always regularly updating websites or social media, or their resources no longer being available. As such, her research became a relational process often that relied on conversations via email or in-person with communities and organizations. She shared, for example, that an intergenerational community consultation led to conversations about what had been unsuccessfully tried before and how younger generations could learn from this going forward.  Elena’s contributions spoke deeply of the need for people-led processes, and the need to be flexible when navigating the surprises and challenges this creates.