Research Collective

We conduct research relating to (de)colonisation, racism, and everyday peace efforts. We approach research with a settler’s responsibility to not only (re)educate ourselves but also to create and disseminate public and open, accessible and shareable, informative and understandable (re)search.

We are committed to placing people at the core of our research process and we are always experimenting innovative ways to achieve this. We are committed to transformative action and believe profound positive changes that we envision may take a long time. However, we also want local communities to be able to benefit from the research process itself. For this reason, many of our research projects will have an ‘action’ component in them. They will also be designed as processes of sharing and exchanging knowledge.

We recognise that knowledge is not something that can only be learnt through academic institutions. People who have direct experiences of social processes have valuable knowledge, too. Through our research processes, we seek to find ways of creating new knowledge together, by sharing and learning from each other. Participants are considered much more than research ‘subjects’. They are agents, too. 

We seek to develop long-term relationships with the people who participate in our research whereas possible. We are not external observers. We welcome the establishment of human bonds based on mutual respect, trust, care, and why not? Even love. We are happy to keep engaging with the people with meet and keep learning from them much beyond our ‘interview’ sessions are over. 

The primary goal of our research is to lead to positive change – everyday peace – for the local community. We welcome people’s inputs in regards to how this should look like, and how to achieve it. We are also committed to being mindful of the discourse we produce as a result of our research, and the possible impact it may have on the ground or the water. 

We are aware of the potentialities of re–colonisation when we carry out research. We choose to use the term ‘(re)search to mark a decolonised conceptualization to critically analyse history, as well as academia. The ‘(re)’ signifies a (re)examination of previous research, founded on imperial ideologies and from mostly male perspectives. To ‘(re)search’ is to re–learn, re–examine, and re–comprehend legal, political, and social systems of the West. In addition, the term ‘Indigenous knowledge(s)’ is employed to provide a broader perspective to recognize diverse and varying approaches to (re)search findings, information, and understanding(s) gained.