Abstract
Adopting critical research methodologies in the global South requires straddling national and international expectations about what, how and why the research is done. One approach to deal with the competing tensions in these questions is through a global South–North research partnership that continuously reflects on and adjusts the methodology as part of the research process itself. We take the example of a research partnership between Chinese and Australian researchers to explore how the practical tensions are resolved in the choices made about the research subject, design, methods, analysis and knowledge translation. We find that the key to the intercultural practice is to prioritise the relationships in the research team, in the research setting and in the research application. The reflective relationships have the capacity to address the apparently conflicting expectations about research, in a way that incrementally adjusts the intercultural methodology.
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Notes
- 1.
The case study was published in Chinese first (Xie and Shang 2009). It was later published in English as a chapter in an edited collection aimed at an international social science audience (Fisher et al. 2011b). The larger research project followed a similar pattern of Chinese followed by English publication (Fisher and Li 2008; Shang 2008, 2012, 2013; Shang et al. 2011; Shang and Wang 2011; Fisher and Shang 2013, 2014).
- 2.
Nanjing University, Renmin University of China, Peking University, Shandong University and Jilin University.
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Fisher, K.R., Shang, X., Xie, J. (2016). Global South–North Partnerships: Intercultural Methodologies in Disability Research. In: Grech, S., Soldatic, K. (eds) Disability in the Global South. International Perspectives on Social Policy, Administration, and Practice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_36
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