White researchers, and researchers based in white supremacist systems, historically have come into Black communities with power: the power to influence funding decisions, the design of programs, and policy changes that affect the lives of Black people. That power was often used in ways that harmed and re-traumatized Black communities. At the same time, the deep expertise that Black people have about their own lives and their ideas for the future have been undervalued and silenced by white supremacist systems.
Research doesn’t have to be that way. There are those in the research community who seek to upend the traditional research paradigm rooted in white supremacy, particularly Black, Brown, and Indigenous researchers like Selina Smith, Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar, and Eve Tuck. At the Social IMPACT Research Center, we aim to incorporate those methods into our work. Some examples include:
- Racial equity prompts in fundraising and research design: setting up a project to successfully advance racial equity and center the voices of directly impacted people requires work on the front end to ensure that the research design, funding, and timeline adequately supports those principles. We’ve created prompts for the research design and fundraising process to hold ourselves accountable to those goals, inspired by the work of Heather Krause and Chicago Beyond.
- Assessing racial equity through debriefing: our team has a long-standing culture of learning that includes regular project check-ins and mid-point and post-project debriefs. We’ve recently incorporated a racial equity assessment tool where we can score the extent to which our research is being conducted equitably. We continue to iterate and revise the tool with time and experience, and reflect on the results at team-wide meetings so we can take those lessons into future projects.
- Using participatory research methods: Participatory research methods share decision-making power between the community and the researchers. While it can take many forms, it can look like recruiting and compensating an advisory board of people with lived expertise to inform research design, data collection methods and tools, data analysis and interpretation, and communication of research results. It can also look like training people with lived expertise on research methods so that they are collecting and analyzing data alongside the research team.
- Journey mapping: Journey mapping has historically been used in HIV/AIDS research to give power to experience through art and descriptive storytelling. A version of it has also been used in human-centered design. We have been exploring adapting journey mapping methods to develop pathways to outcomes defined by communities with whom we partner. The process is iterative, participatory, and open. Journey mapping allows study participants to center their experience at the heart of a research question, defining where they started, where they want to go, and what they need to get there. We think this type of process could be really useful in developing participant-centered programs and policy.
We’re far from perfect. We have a long way to go on the journey of conducting anti-racist research. Doing research in a way that dismantles power systems takes more time, trust-building, collaboration, and money than traditional research does—and thoughtful, patient funding partners to support that work. But we are committed to learning and growing on this path. If you have ideas for how to get there, please let us know. And keep an eye out for future eNews that showcase examples of projects that use the methods above.
