Abstract
The intrinsic hierarchies between a researcher and her research participants in the daily business of fieldwork are often a ground for unease among academics. This unease has brought about a myriad of collaborative and participatory research methods that attempt to flatten out these power imbalances. However, constraints in the scope of academic research or uncritical good intensions bring with them the danger of a collaborative project being little more than tokenistic. It is therefore important to critically reflect on, and communicate about, our collaborative research projects. Various research participants asked me to conduct research together with them during my first fieldwork in Timor-Leste. This resonated with me as I am convinced that research should consist of an exchange of knowledge rather than an extraction of it. Consequently, I set up a collaborative research group with students from the National University of Timor-Leste as part of my doctoral fieldwork. This article is based on diary entries, field notes, and reflections written during the process of planning, implementing, and finally dismantling that collaborative research group. I explore four successive affective stages of the project: excited and expectant, inspired and energized, dispirited and disappointed, and accepting and adjusting. While discussing the methodological adjustments I made throughout these phases I reflect on the intricately related affective dimensions of this attempt at a collaborative research project.
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- 1.
Diary entries were originally Dutch and have been translated by the author.
- 2.
Tetun (the Timorese national language) for “sister,” which is the polite way to address an unrelated woman.
- 3.
All names are pseudonyms.
- 4.
See for example Kindon et al. (2007).
- 5.
The island of Timor was split into two by Portuguese and Dutch colonizers. The eastern half (today Timor-Leste) remained Portuguese territory until 1975. In that year, after a unilateral declaration of independence, Indonesia violently invaded and integrated East Timor. Twenty-four years of occupation and fierce resistance came to an end when, in 1999, the UN hosted a referendum in which 78.5% of the population voted for independence. Timor-Leste became an independent nation-state in 2002 (CAVR 2005).
- 6.
This meant, for example, that I explained the process of writing a literature review step by step, outlining the different kinds of sources they could use. It meant preparing matrixes in which they could fill in the texts they read, the sub-topics they found, and the pages on which they could find them. It meant I prepared the basic structure of an outline into which they could enter their topics in order to create their own research outline.
- 7.
This was one of the questions in the structured “emotion diary” that I kept throughout my fieldwork for the Researchers’ Affects project.
- 8.
Public transport minivan.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this chapter for their valuable thoughts and stimulating feedback. I also wish to thank Lesley Branagan for her generous, precise, and constructive language editing. Finally, and most of all, I want to thank the participants of the collaborative research project for the inspiration they gave me and the lessons they taught me.
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ten Brinke, S. (2019). Attuning Engagement: Methodological and Affective Dimensions of a Failed Collaborative Research Project in Timor-Leste. In: Stodulka, T., Dinkelaker, S., Thajib, F. (eds) Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography. Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20831-8_23
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