New article alert! Lindy Van Vliet, alongside other scholars including the Lab’s Research Associate Sarah Tarshis, Co-Director Katherine Occhiuto, Director Sarah Todd, Lab Manager and Research Coordinator Ruxi Gheorghe, and Lab Affiliate Pamela Grassau, recently published the article titled Doing Research Differently: Fostering Relational Ethics in Research Teams. The article was published in the social work journal, Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work, and it is available open-access for free!
Feminist research methods have been historically collaborative and team-based, using the expertise of multiple researchers to analyze complex social problems. However, while feminist research teams often aim to be non-hierarchal and push against pre-existing power structures, they still exist within the neoliberal university which mediates how this resistance shows up. This article reflects on how a relational ethics of care can act as a disruptor to neoliberal academia. It offers reflections from a feminist research group on how they adopted a relational ethics of care and the impact it had on the research process. This article is not meant to be a guidebook for how to show care and resist neoliberal academic structure, but rather as a contribution to the ongoing conversations about how research teams can show up for each other and ourselves as researchers and beyond. The authors share this story in an attempt to foster a hopefulness within the messiness of relational research processes that have the potential to cultivate more compassionate and caring ways to conduct research.
Check out the article here—it is available open access!