Extraction, Appropriation and Silencing in Research

This online workshop has been organised by the Civil Society, Development and Democracy (CDD) Pathway and is open to all ESRC and non-ESRC funded PhD and MA Social Research students within the WRDTP’s seven partner universities. Whilst this workshop is aimed at CDD Pathway students, PGRs from all seven interdisciplinary Pathways are welcome to attend.

This session goes beyond standard university ethics considerations to reflect on broader concerns related to researching from different disciplinary, institutional, social, and subject positions.

We will consider some of the most vital questions in debates around research practice, including the following: Who is represented and how? Who is the intended audience of the research, and how does this affect what we write? Are participants distanced and alienated from their own stories in our research? At what point in the research process is information commodified? And who comes to own that information as intellectual property?

Overall, we will consider how our research fits within the broader global political economy and history of knowledge, and what this means we need to consider in terms of silencing and extraction in the research process.

Students attending this training will gain:

• An understanding of debates across major disciplines on how research can be extractive
• Consciousness of how research can reproduce silences of particular stories and histories
• Awareness of the political economy and ethics of knowledge production and how these impact participants and the societies we write about

Core Readings

Trouillot, M. R. (2003). Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness. In Global transformations (pp. 7-28). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

‘Introduction’ in, Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd.

Tilley, L. (2017). Resisting piratic method by doing research otherwise. Sociology, 51(1), 27-42.

Additional Readings

Cusicanqui, S. R. (2012). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(1), 95-109.

Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. Sage.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. (2017). Decolonising research methodology must include undoing its dirty history. Journal of Public Administration, 52(Special Issue 1), 186-188.

Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books Ltd..

Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.