Revisiting Insider Practices: Ethical Considerations, Practices, and Hopes for Doing Community Work and Narrative Research in and about Our Own Communities

Authors

Tiffany Sostar, Faculty of Social Work, University of Melbourne, AustraliaFollow
Nathan Viktor Fawaz, Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, & Recreation, University of Alberta, CanadaFollow
Elliot Trimble, Independent Researcher
Theodosia Octavia Markarian, Deceased
Bekett Noble, Deceased

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the hopes, considerations, and questions of a narrative practice research collaboration among three closely connected transgender (trans) and/or non-binary collaborators, in a collection of work meant to support trans, non-binary, and gender expansive life and in response to trans death at a time of increasing hostility toward trans communities. We apply a specific focus on inquiring into how to do narrative therapy and community work research in and about our own communities, and what the ethical, relational and methodological practices for this work might be. We do this through reflecting on existing literature related to insider research in the field of narrative therapy and community work and in qualitative research more broadly, reflecting on our own practices of collaboration, and imagining possibilities for ourselves and other researchers working with and within their own communities. We describe our insider-outsider-insider positioning, how we understand this to be shaping our work, and share our ongoing curiosities about how to move through this work together.

Keywords

collective narrative practice, community work, transgender, re-membering, partnerships, narrative therapy, insider-outsider research, intimate insider research

Author Bio(s)

Tiffany Sostar, MNTCW (ORCiD: 0009-0002-9443-096X) is a member of the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Melbourne. Please direct correspondence to tsostar@student.unimelb.edu.au

Nathan Viktor Fawaz (ORCiD: 0000-0003-3521-2305) is a member of the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, & Recreation at the University of Alberta, Canada. Please direct correspondence to nvfawaz@ualberta.ca

We (Nathan, Elliot, and Tiffany) acknowledge that the subject of authorship is complex, and that disciplinary bounds related to authorship and consent exist for very good reasons. At the time of writing, both Theodosia Octavia Markarian and Bekett Noble were no longer living. With respect to this complexity, we have chosen to include Bekett and Theda as authors of this paper because they both aspired to academic publication, and because many of the ideas shared in this paper came directly from conversations and experiences shared from their time as in-bodied people. We have taken this decision in alignment with our shared personal and ethical longing to not (only) memorialize Theda and Bekett, but also to create a context for their active inclusion in the formal academic space of citational recognition for their contribution to knowledge. We would also like to note that we see the potential for their authorial inclusion as limited to this single paper. This paper is at the very edge of what they shared in in-bodied form and were actively engaged with when they died.

Publication Date

12-23-2024

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2024.7807

Recommended APA Citation

Sostar, T., Fawaz, N. V., Trimble, E., Markarian, T. O., & Noble, B. (2024). Revisiting insider practices: Ethical considerations, practices, and hopes for doing community work and narrative research in and about our own communities. The Qualitative Report, 29(12), 129-150. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2024.7807