Doing participant observation

Reflections on embodied research and digital ethnography

Since November, I’ve been collaborating with two colleagues, Chloe and Don, who I met through my work as manager of the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP) five years ago. Chloe Dragon Smith is a young woman born and raised in Somba K’é (Yellowknife), Denendeh (Northwest Territories). She is of German, Dënesųłiné, Métis, and French heritage, and Chloe grew up close to her Indigenous cultural values, learning traditional skills for living on the land. She is the co-founder of an outdoor learning initiative called Bushkids, located in Yellowknife, and she explores Indigenous-led conservation in many forms. Chloe and her partner Robert, who is Mikisew Cree, are the only Indigenous peoples living in Wood Buffalo National Park, land which was part of their traditional territories before all Dene and Cree peoples were displaced from that land to make way for the park. Don Carruthers Den Hoed (he/him) is a settler Research Associate at the University of British Columbia where he leads the Canadian Parks Collective for Innovation and Leadership (CPCIL), a pan-Canadian parks and protected areas leadership and research network aimed at revealing, connecting, and transforming an inclusive community of park leaders, academics, and Indigenous knowledge-holders. We have wanted to collaborate to offer training for conservation leaders connected to the CRP for several years. When that collaboration started to move forward through my work with the CRP, my Ph.D. committee agreed that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. They directed me to collect data through participant observation and archive it until I am further along in my program and am able to do the analysis.

Since November, we have been offering a pilot workshop series for five non-Indigenous national-scale conservation organizations in Canada at no cost to the organizations. The purpose is to support these organizations in deepening their commitments to supporting Indigenous-led conservation and enacting reconciliatory and decolonial change. Don and Chloe have been designing and facilitating the workshops, and we frequently meet as a team to discuss potential approaches to the content and workshop design. Don and Chloe always make final decisions and to date, they have been delivering the content and guiding discussion during the workshops. I have been doing administrative labour to organize participants and schedule the sessions, and I document all the conversations that take place as part of the research process. We have been working with twelve participants (2-3 from each organization), many of whom are senior leaders within their organizations. The participants are mainly white and are almost all settlers; there are two self-identified Indigenous participants in the program. As of early April, the program has consisted of:

• A one hour pre-meet with participants from each organization to discuss program goals and objectives

• A four-day virtual residency in November. Each day was a four-hour workshop

• Several individual and/or organizational 1:1 check-ins between participants and the facilitators

• A four-hour workshop on the third Friday of each month in January, February and March.

We do not yet have an end date for the program. It is being co-created with participants through a learner-centered, relational, and emergent process. We are working towards a land-based retreat in Fall 2024.

Embodied experience as researcher

When I reflect on my experiences doing participant observation to date, what first comes to mind is the relationship between my embodied self as researcher and the work of doing participant observation. Grasseni (2022) argues that “as ethnographers, our tools are first and foremost our eyes, our bodies, our senses. We observe while we participate” (pg. 13). In the following short reflection, I will contemplate some of what I am learning through the embodied experience of research observation and some emerging questions I have as I grow and learn as a becoming researcher.  

First, it is important to note that several workshop participants asked me not to video or audio record the virtual workshops. They worried that, as senior leaders within their organizations, they would self-censor to avoid potential reputational risk to their organizations should the recording be leaked in some way. Consequently, I have had to rely on my ability to capture data in the moment, which has proven challenging in a virtual environment for many reasons. I have come to realize that when people participate in a virtual workshop, the experience is overwhelmingly one of verbal exchange. People don’t take a lot of pauses when they are speaking like they would in conversation with someone in person. Spontaneous interruptions from others participating in the discussion don’t often occur either. Instead, the workshops are like one monologue after another, repeatedly for hours at a time. In a virtual setting people use the chat function in Zoom to reflect and respond to what is being shared verbally. This happens most often when someone says something that resonates with another participant, when someone says something vulnerable and other participants offer their support and encouragement, or when someone offers an observation that creates a new insight for another participant. This is important data that needs to be documented alongside and in relationship with what is being spoken aloud.  

Photo of my left forearm and hand, fingers extended against a white background. I am wearing a grey wrist brace.

I have found it very difficult to stay ‘on top of’ all the data that is being generated during these exchanges. The sheer volume is overwhelming, and I find myself feeling anxious about not being able to document everything. While I know I will miss some things, I do try to capture as much of what is shared verbally as I can. Once something is uttered, the conversation moves on very quickly. I worry that I will miss the next important or interesting data point because I’m still thinking about or trying to capture the last thing I heard. It feels like I’m standing in fast-moving water, trying to document a precise moment when everything is changing second by second. When I experiment with taking notes more slowly, pausing to assess and listen for what feels important, there is a disconnect between my brain and my body. My fingers can’t transition from being still to typing quickly enough. Before I know it, that important moment passes and I’m no longer deeply listening. Instead, I’m focusing my attention on typing. This takes me out of the moment in a way that is jarring and disorienting.

So instead, I type everything I can. The consistent tap-tap-tap helps me to keep my fingers moving and it becomes something my body does on autopilot, like breathing. This enables me to dissociate from the physicality of typing so I can focus my mind more on listening. While this data collection strategy has had some benefits, it has also had consequences for my body. I have developed carpal tunnel syndrome from all the repetitive moments and lack of breaks. My hands, fingers, and arms go numb. My grip strength has been impacted – I can barely lift a plate from the cupboard and I am less able to do things I enjoy, like strength training, gardening, or playing hockey. The workshops are ongoing, so I need to manage my symptoms. I wear braces at night, and I’ve readjusted my workspace to optimize the ergonomic setup. However, I am concerned about the physical toll this process is having on my body.  

Affect, emotion, and the virtual environment 

The pressure I feel to document all the verbal communication that takes place in these workshops means I am less attentive to other kinds of data. In particular, I am less attentive to affect and physical cues that would help me trace the way affect is moving through the group and influencing their learning. This is challenging because affect is an important part of anti- and decolonial pedagogies (Zembylas, 2018; Ragan, 2011).  

I keep Zoom open and in gallery view on a second monitor while I am doing the live transcription of the workshops. This helps me quickly scan and see everyone from time to time. I can notice where they are, whether they are experiencing disruptions from family or work, and their general body language. However, I am not able to closely watch how participants respond to one another as they are speaking and to see if and how those physical cues are different between the participants. While I am a bit distracted due to the notetaking, I think part of why I am focusing so much verbal communication is that I am finding it very difficult to read people’s physical cues and sense emotion in the virtual environment. I haven’t met any of the people participating in the research in person yet, so I lack context for their body language and movement. This is even true for my collaborators, the workshop facilitators. Only occasionally do a make note if someone looks uncomfortable (shifting in seat, looking off in the distance away from the screen, or down instead of attempting to make eye contact). Most often, I will pause my notetaking if someone speaks with thick emotion in their voice or if they verbally indicate that they are challenged by an idea or are feeling emotional. Otherwise, emotion feels disconnected and distant.  

I know that the workshop participants feel connected to one another. In one-on-one conversations, most of the participants expressed feeling surprised by the strength of the relationships they have cultivated with one another in a virtual environment. Most have also expressed gratitude for the cohort and view the workshop as a “safe space” where they can share their vulnerabilities with trusted colleagues. Curiously, I feel emotionally disconnected from the group. This is unusual for me because I am usually someone who very easily feels deep emotional connections to people – even people I haven’t met in person before. I wonder if the disconnect I am experiencing is because I am playing the role of researcher - I am both ‘in’ the experience and outside of it – documenting it and listening in a different way (Spradley, 1980). I try to stay connected to my body but it’s hard in a virtual space. I am pulled more into my head than my heart. I am also curious about the way the numbness in my hands mirrors the affective numbness I am experiencing and I am troubled by my lack of attention to affect in my participant observation practice.  

Why is affect important for decolonial pedagogies? Rice et al. (2022) draw on Sara Ahmed’s political economy of emotion to explain how “knowledge and ignorance bind white settler social bodies together through emotion and how, given their embodiment, these affects are difficult to disrupt” (Rice et al., 2022, pg. 5). Ahmed’s (2004) work also shows how we “become invested in particular structures such that their demise is felt as a kind of living death” (pg. 12). Even when we challenge our emotional investments, we can become stuck and must be vigilant to the ways in which this can happen (Ahmed, 2004, pg. 19). Similarly, Michalinos Zembylas (2018) theorizes white discomfort as a social and political affect that produces colonial structures and practices and advocates for pedagogies of discomfort, which encourage learners to engage in critical inquiry to interrogate cherished values and beliefs. Through this interrogation, discomforting feelings can be engaged to challenge assumptions and practices that perpetuate systemic inequities (pg. 93). Finally, the work of Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2009) shows how ‘felt knowledge’ of settler colonialism is often communicated through stories as a practice which either “reifies settler colonial structures or offer an ‘otherwise’ as a powerful tool for social change” (Million, 2014, pg. 72). As explained by Rice et al. (2022) Million’s work shows how the embodied testimonies of Indigenous women, who embody the intersections of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism, “carry the potential to move settlers’ psyches and worldviews” (pg. 5). While I am finding it difficult to be aware of affect while I am doing participant observation, it is undoubtedly important for my research objectives. I will need to try to be more attentive of affect and the ways in which it can affect can reify and/or unsettle settler subjectivities.   

Co-creating and documenting digital worlds

As previously mentioned, the workshops are very focused on verbal communication; however, the participants and facilitators have also been busy co-creating rich digital worlds. Click on the audio files below to hear descriptions of some of what the participants have created:  

• Introductions to ourselves and our places  

• Connecting across the nature-culture divide  

• Group brainstorming boards  

• Starting the conversation – introducing organizational ‘roses, buds and thorns’ from the perspective of each participant   

All this content is data because it is part of the participant’s learning experience, and part of a collective sense-making experience. In a virtual workshop series like the one I am studying, these digital worlds the participants create are an important source of connection. They help provide a sense of who we are in relationship with. They help share the places, people, and more-than-human kin we love with each other. We’ve met each other’s dogs, chickens, children. We’ve seen each other visit ancient cedar forests, sweeping grasslands, ocean bays, and urban parks.  The digital worlds we are co-creating help us communicate our stories with each other, provide context for our journeys, and position ourselves in relation to one another and our work. They help us make sense of ourselves and each other as we move through the often-disorienting work of unsettling. The digital content also provides an anchor, somewhere to return to when we inevitably feel unmoored and uncomfortable, or uncertain about where we are going in our journey together.  

During one of the workshops, each participant opened an envelope containing a card and gifts sent by me and the workshop facilitators. The gift included teas made from herbs harvested locally from an Indigenous-owned company near where Don, one of the workshop facilitators, lives in British Columbia. On our first break we were all encouraged to make tea and to smell the steeped tea together at the same time before we took our first sip. It was a way of trying to connect us viscerally across digital space and time. The gift also contained a beaver fur cellphone cozy harvested by Chloe’s Mom. Chloe is the other workshop facilitator and Chloe and her Mom are both Dënesųłinë́ women from the Fort Smith area. Chloe provided a teaching about the beaver fur, explaining that the beaver is an important source of warmth in the winter, and asked each participant to place their hand on the fur for a few minutes. We all noticed how the fur warmed our palms within a matter of seconds. Chloe shared that beaver is sometimes used to help people ground themselves when they have something to do that might make them anxious or feel uncertain. She encouraged the participants to engage with the beaver to find comfort and strength. Both the tea and the fur are a way of connecting with one another across time and place, and also provide a way of connecting with more-than-human kin (plants, animals) and the humans who care for them. Both the digital worlds and gift-giving are ways of creating relationality with one another.

The experience of opening the gifts together in a virtual environment made me think of ethnographic practices and the importance of engaging the senses. Grasseni talks about needing to learn to use the body in order to “sense and make sense...in ways that are relevant and apprenticed to particular communities of users, practitioners, co-seers, co-listeners, and co-sensers". (Grasseni, 2022). To do so, we must become attuned to how technology and the body mediate both perception and understanding – and this is a learned skill (Ibid.).  

Image of beaver fur on paper with the words “Aurora Heat, cellphone cozy” and “Wild beaver fur handcrafted in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories” on it. The beaver fur is in the middle of the image and is a large circle. It is dark and light brown.

Image of brochure that explains where the fur came from, the relational connections to people, place and more-than human kin that guide the harvesting practices of Brenda as a Dënesųłinë́ woman. The paper has text in small font and two photos: one of a young child dressed warmly in fur and synethic snowsuit in the cold northern winter. The other photo is of Chloe’s grandmother and grandfather on a boat together with the Athabasca river delta behind them.

Concluding thoughts and emerging questions 

Through this reflective exercise, I have deepened my understanding of how my body is responding to and influencing the research process. I’ve considered how my experience of the virtual workshops is influencing my approach to data collection and the impact that process is having on my body. I have also considered my approach to writing field notes and how challenging it is to create detailed written notes at the moment while also attending to affect and the effects of emotion on opening or foreclosing possibilities for a decolonial shift within workshop participants. Finally, I have reflected on the importance of digital world making and place-making in creating a relational learning process within a digital learning environment with decolonial goals.

I conclude with a few questions that I will continue to consider and engage with as I conclude the coursework for the PhD program and move towards proposal writing.

• How can I strengthen my ability to engage my senses in ethnographic practice?  

• What strategies can I deploy to help focus my attention on affect and emotion during the virtual workshops?  

• How does my/our bodies affect our attempts to unsettle conservation?

I look forward to deepening my research practice, and further developing my research skills as I transition from coursework into the research phase of my doctoral experience.

Works Cited

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion, second edition. Edinburgh University Press.

Grasseni, C., (2022). Learning to see. In Barendregt, B., de Maaker, E., De Musso, F., Littlejohn, A., Maeckelbergh, M., Postma, M., & Westmoreland, M. R. Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography: A Practical and Theoretical Guide (1st ed., Vol 1). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003132417  

Million, D. (2009). Felt theory: An Indigenous feminist approach to affect and history. Wicazo Sa Review, 24(2), 52-76. http://doi.org/10.1353./wic.0.0043

Million, D. (2014). There is a river in me: Theory from life. In A. Simpson & A. Smith. (Eds.), Theorizing Native studies. Duke University Press.

Ragan, P. (2011). Unsettling the settler within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press.

Rice, C., Dion, S.D., Fowlie, H. & Breen, A. (2022). Identifying and working through settler ignorance. Critical Studies in Education, 63:1, 15-30, http://10.1080/17508487.2020.1830818 

Spradley, J. (1980). Participant observation. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Zembylas, M. (2018) Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: Decolonial strategies for ‘pedagogies of discomfort’. Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86-104. http://10.1080/17449642.2018.14287

Institutional ethnography: Uncovering the ruling relations of the conservation sector in Canada

Introduction 

For almost five years, I have had the honour of managing the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), an Indigenous-led SSHRC Partnership Grant that aims to 1) support the transformation of nature conservation in Canada, and support Indigenous Nations and governments with the development and implementation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs). As a network, we bring together a diverse range of partners including Indigenous leaders, environmental conservation organizations, academic institutions, scholars and researchers who are committed to acting on and building from the recommendations set out by the Indigenous Circle of Expert’s report We Rise Together.   

At this intersection of environmental and social justice, there is no shortage of interesting and important questions that could frame my doctoral project. It is no secret that environmentalism, and by extension conservation, is a white, settler movement (Curnow & Helferty, 2018; Scott, 2023). Mainstream conservation is part of Canada’s settler-colonial past and present, contributing to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their territories; disrupted Indigenous governance, legal orders, and complex relational systems; and privileged positivist scientific knowledge (Carroll, 2014; Moola & Roth, 2019). In addition to these social injustices, conservation is ineffective at providing positive ecological outcomes – it is now indisputable that we are living through the dual mass extinction and climate crises. However, there is increased recognition among scholars and conservation practitioners of the efficacy of Indigenous approaches to caring for lands and waters. An often-quoted statistic shows that while Indigenous peoples comprise about 6% of the world’s population, Indigenous territories account for 80% of the world’s biodiversity (Garnett, et al., 2019). We are in a moment of shift with the potential for transforming the conservation sector.  

Changing tides 

In March, 2018, the Indigenous Circle of Experts (ICE), a national advisory body and part of the Pathway to Canada Target 1 federal policy initiative, released the We Rise Together (2018) report. The report articulated how Indigenous-led conservation can help achieve national conservation goals while advancing reconciliation in Canada. ICE advocated for the advancement of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), which are “lands and waters where Indigenous governments have the primary role in protecting and conserving ecosystems through Indigenous laws, governance and knowledge systems” (ICE, 2018, pg. 35). IPCAs, therefore, are both a conservation mechanism and a tool to advance self-determination and sovereignty for Indigenous Nations. ICE called upon environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) to partner with Indigenous governments in the design, implementation, and management of IPCAs (ICE, 2018, pg.61).

In 2019, the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP) was launched to continue the momentum of the Indigenous Circle of Experts. An Indigenous-led network, the CRP seeks to investigate, inform, and transform conservation strategy and practice by centering Indigenous leadership, rights, responsibilities, and knowledge. Several large ENGOs, including the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), the David Suzuki Foundation, Ducks Unlimited Canada, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, Nature United, the Wildlife Conservation Society of Canada, and World Wildlife Fund Canada are active partners in the CRP. There are also a number of smaller conservation organizations that engage with CRP resources and attend CRP learning events, such as our popular virtual campfire webinar series. As the manager of the CRP, one question I receive consistently from non-Indigenous conservation organizations is “how is our role in conservation changing?”. It is through my work with the CRP that I have come to realize that one important contribution I could make as a white settler is to support the conservation sector in deepening their reconciliatory and decolonial commitments.  

Institutional ethnography: Revealing ruling relations to enable change 

Stein et al. (2023) recently interviewed 12 conservation leaders in Canada to learn about how they are confronting colonial conservation within their organizations. They found that most of these organizations are in the early stages of learning to engage with Indigenous governments in ways that "do not reproduce colonial relations and practices" (pg. 7). Williams et al. (2012) argue that analysis of practices, which are activities that humans regularly engage in, can bring about real-world change for justice-seeking communities. No one has yet completed a detailed analysis of the specific institutional practices conservation organizations are employing, how these practices may limit or enable decolonization, and how they are hooked into trans-local processes and structures. My research aims to respond to these gaps in the literature while helping to catalyze social change within the Canadian conservation sector.  

During my qualifying exam preparations, I have been spending a lot of time reading the work of resurgent scholars, like Glen Coulthard (2014) and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2018). Through this engagement, I have come to appreciate that decolonial change must attend to both material/structural change (attentive to complex power relations) and psycho-affective change (subjectivities). This framing has helped guide me towards two methodological approaches for my project: institutional ethnography and participant observation of decolonial pedagogies at work. Through institutional ethnography, I hope to work with five national-scale conservation organizations in Canada that have influence over environmental policy, play an important role in shaping the Canadian public’s understanding of conservation and human-nature relationships, and have publicly committed to supporting Indigenous-led conservation.  

First created by sociologist Dorothy Smith in the late early 1990’s, institutional ethnography (IE) is a methodology that been taken up by scholars and activists who are interested in explaining how the everyday lives of people are shaped and influenced by forces beyond their knowledge and direct experience, with the goal of “organizing to disrupt social relations of oppression operating in and through their own lives” (Nicols, Griffith & MacLarnon, 2017, pg.111). IE comes from a feminist reading of Marx and Engel and their approach to social science. As an empirical methodology, IE is “grounded in actual people, their work, and the real conditions of their lives” (Smith & Griffith, 2022, pg. 10; Nicoles & Griffith, 2017). Exploring a “social world happening” requires a different approach from other qualitative methodologies which can “objectify people and events, and slot them into theoretical categories to arrive at explanation” (Rankin, 2017, pg. 2; Campbell & Gregor, 2002, pg. 17). When conducting an IE, data collection and findings must be “grounded in the materiality of people’s doings” and this ontological core is what makes institutional ethnography “unique among qualitative approaches” (Rankin, 2017, pg. 2). Institutional ethnographers strive to show, not to tell, how social relations work. Inquiry starts with people and what they do, striving to show how their “experiences are put together by forces and powers beyond their practice and direct knowledge” (Nicols, Griffith, & McLaren, 2017, pg. 111). 

I am interested in IE for its potential to show how colonial relations are embodied, enacted, and reproduced in the work of settler conservation organizations, despite well-intentioned efforts to support Indigenous-led conservation. I am drawn to institutional ethnography because of its focus on power relations and its ability to describe how those relations structure and coordinate the everyday lives of people, even from afar. From my understanding, this aligns well with Indigenous resurgent scholars who describe settler-colonialism as a relation of domination that is maintained by social structures, processes, and practices (Coulthard, 2014; Simpson, 2018). When these processes and practices shift, these relations of domination can become reified, though expressed in a different form (Simpson, 2018). Alternatively, these moments of shift can be thought of as "moments of reconfiguration” when the state and settler-colonial relations are made vulnerable to intervention (Snelgrove and Wildcat, 2023). As a starting place, my IE will seek to understand how the settler conservation sector in Canada works in ways that open and/or foreclose possibilities for decolonizing conservation. I will strive to answer the following questions: 

1) What is the work that settler conservation organizations are doing?  

2) What are the ruling relations that coordinate that work across the sector?

3) What interventions are settler conservation organizations using to shift colonial relations, and to what effect? 

I am also interested in institutional ethnography (IE) because of its strong synergies with participatory action research, community-engaged research, Indigenous and feminist methodologies, anti-colonial, and anti-racist approaches ( Campbell and Gregor, 2002, pg. 109). Power is a central concern in decolonial scholarship, and power is also central to institutional ethnography inquiry. Campbell and Gregor (2002) argue that IE can help people “gain the skills to see how power works through special institutional forms of knowing” so they can begin to “take more control over their lives” (pg. 12). Similarly, DeVault and McCoy (2006) emphasize the liberatory potential of IE, arguing that IE can help specify possible "levers" or targets for activist intervention (pg. 19).  

In the context of my project, I hope to show the participating conservation organization how their work is hooked into structures and processes that uphold colonial relations. Many of the organizations I work with assume that they are facing unique challenges with respect to supporting Indigenous-led conservation. While it is true that attempts to enact decolonial change must be attentive and responsive to place-based contexts and relations, trans-local and structural power dynamics also have an influence over the range of possible decolonial movements. IE has the potential to show conservation organizations how their work is coordinated by similar (or the same) ruling relations. I am hoping this will help the sector understand where to focus their advocacy efforts, and how they may need to work together to bring about change. Not only will the IE be helpful for settler conservation organizations, but the study's outcomes can also be used by Indigenous Nations, governments, and organizations to hold these organizations to account. All my work is intended to support Indigenous-led conservation futures, and this project will be one more resource Indigenous leaders can draw upon as they navigate and negotiate change for their communities.  

Works Cited

Campbell, M.L., & Gregor, F.M. (2002). Mapping social relations: A primer in doing institutional ethnography. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Carroll, C. (2014). Native enclosures: Tribal national parks and the progressive politics of environmental stewardship in Indian Country. Geoforum, 53, 31-40. http://doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.02.003

Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (2024). About us. https://conservation-reconciliation.ca/about-us-1.

Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: The politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

Curnow, J., & Helferty, A. (2018). Contradictions of Solidarity: Whiteness, settler coloniality, and the mainstream environmental movement. Environment and Society, 9(1), 145–163. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090110

DeVault, M.L. & McCoy, L. (2006). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In Smith, D.E. (Ed), Institutional ethnography as practice (pp. 15-45). Rowman & Littlefield

Garnett, S.T., Burgess, N.D., Fa, J.E., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Molnár, Z., Robinson, C.J., Watson, J.E.M., Zander, K.K., Austin, B., Brondizio, E.S., Collier, N.F., Duncan, T., Ellis, E., Geyle, H., Jackson, M.V., Jonas, H., Malmer, P., McGowan, B., Sivongxay, A. & Leiper, I. (2018). A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation. Nature Sustainability, 1, 369–374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0100-6

Indigenous Circle of Experts. (2018). We Rise Together: Achieving Pathway to Canada Target 1 through the creation of Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in the spirit and practice of reconciliation. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57e007452e69cf9a7af0a033/t/5ab94aca6d2a7338ecb1d05e/1522092766605/PA234-ICE_Report_2018_Mar_22_web.pdf.

Moola, F., & Roth, R. (2019). Moving beyond colonial conservation models: Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas offer hope for biodiversity and advancing reconciliation in the Canadian boreal forest, Environmental Reviews, 27(2), 200-201. http://doi:10.1139/er-2018-0091

Nature Conservancy of Canada. (2023, March 5). Indigenous conservation. Nature Conservancy of Canada. https://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/what-we-do/indigenous-conservation/

Nature United. (2023, March 5). Our priorities: Indigenous-led conservation. Nature United. https://www.natureunited.ca/what-we-do/our-priorities/indigenous-led-conservation/

Nichols, N., Griffith, A., & McLarnon, M. (2017). Community-Based and Participatory Approaches in Institutional Ethnography. In Perspectives on and from Institutional Ethnography (Vol. 15, pp. 107–124). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1042-319220170000015008. 

Rankin, J. (2017). Conducting Analysis in Institutional Ethnography: Analytical Work Prior to Commencing Data Collection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1), 160940691773448-. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917734484 

Scott, J. (2024, January 6). A demand for diversity in the environmental sector. Black outdoors. https://blackoutdoors.wordpress.com/2023/01/06/a-demand-for-diversity-in-the-environmental-sector/.

Simpson, L.B. (2018). As we have always been: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

Smith, D. E., & Griffith, A. I. (2022). Simply institutional ethnography: Creating a sociology for people. University of Toronto Press.  

Snelgrove, C. & Wildcat, M. (2023). Political action in the time of reconciliation. In Stark H.D., Craft, A. & Hōkūlani, K.A. (Eds). Resurgence in the age of reconciliation. University of Toronto Press.

Stein, S., Ahenakew, C., Hunt, D. & Oliveira da Silva Huni Kui, S. (2023). Complexities of confronting colonialism in conservation. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369749616_Complexities_of_Confronting_Colonialism_in_Conservation.

Williams, V., Gall, M., Mason-Angelow, V., Read, S., & Webb, J. (2021). Misfitting and social practice theory: incorporating disability into the performance and (re)enactment of social practices, Disability & Society, doi:10.1080/09687599.2021.1947195.

World Wildlife Fund Canada. (2023, March 5). Indigenous-led conservation. World Wildlife Fund Canada. https://wwf.ca/about-us/indigenous-led-conservation/

Participatory action research: Reflections on being ‘inside’ the research

Navigating multiple roles and responsibilities

What is participatory action research (PAR)? While there is no one definition, PAR can be understood as a participative, relational, and emergent approach to research that seeks to make a change in the world by putting knowledge into action (Bradbury, 2015). PAR troubles the lines between researchers and participants, situating participants as co-inquirers who are learning and building capacity both individually and collectively to address an issue (Ibid.).
The workshop series I am observing and co-creating with Don and Chloe can be understood as PAR. The workshop design is emergent, meaning that it is being developed as the facilitators respond to and learn from/with participants. My project could also be described as critical participatory action research in that the facilitators and I have explicitly political aims – namely to support decolonial and reconciliatory change within the Canadian conservation sector.

In this PAR process, I am ‘inside’ the research because I am playing multiple roles and fulfilling multiple responsibilities. I am providing administrative support which includes organizing and convening the workshops, drafting email correspondence on behalf of the facilitators, developing the introductory materials for the participants, managing finances to ensure the facilitators are getting paid, and securing additional sources of funding. I am a collaborator and co-conspirator; I participate actively in debriefs with the facilitators where I share my observations, curiosities, questions, concerns, and potential directions the workshops could take. I am also a researcher; I take careful field notes, engage in participant observation, consider the interplay between theory and practice to generate new knowledge, and ensure compliance with research ethics protocols.

At times, I find it tricky to navigate between these multiple roles. I wonder if and when I should draw a boundary between observing the workshops and trying to help shape them. I am concerned that the workshops are creating a space for the mainly white settler participants to feel too much comfort and safety, and critical decolonial scholars have advocated for pedagogies of discomfort and ‘unsettling’ pedagogies to advance decolonial futures (Zembylas, 2018; Ragan, 2012; Hillier, 2017). I also think we could be pushing workshop participants to consider the power dynamics within the sector, to understand the connections between decolonization and environmental health/wellbeing (Whyte, 2018), and to critically interrogate their roles in upholding settler colonial relations. The participants tend to focus on their own futurity as individuals and organizations, and I would like to see that troubled more consistently (Tuck and Yang, 2012). Sometimes a participant offers something really interesting to the group, like a question about the future of the sector, and the facilitators will leave that thread hanging without tugging on it to see where it might take us. I have also not seen the facilitators directly challenge the participants yet, even when they express resistance or share something that needs to be challenged. For example, one organization disclosed that they accept funds from wealthy philanthropists who hold racist colonial beliefs, and the facilitator did not push them to interrogate the rub between that practice and their organization’s stated commitment to support Indigenous-led conservation. I worry that by leaving a statement like that without addressing it, there is an implicit assumption that we are endorsing that practice.

As a collaborator in this project, I helped shape the initial idea for the program, and have helped secure short-term and multi-year base funding for this work. The project is also part of my work plan for the Conservation through Reconciliation Partnership (CRP), and has been endorsed by the CRP’s leadership circle during our fall strategic retreat. This means I am accountable to the partnership for the program and have a responsibility to help ensure it meets the objectives of the partnership - to help transform colonial conservation and elevate Indigenous-led conservation. Because I am invested in the workshops and their success, I find it challenging to observe these things and not step in. At the same time, I also want to respect the lived experience, expertise, and processes of my colleagues because, as facilitators, they are leading the learning. For now, I have decided to share my observations and concerns with the facilitators during our debriefs as if feels appropriate. Otherwise, I step back so they can lead the process with the group. However, in writing this reflection, I have decided to ask my collaborators for their feedback about how they see my role and if they would welcome more direct interventions from me during the workshops.

Shifting subjectivities: Faithful witnessing of others and self as decolonial praxis

I have also been reflecting on my own subjectivity, and how I relate to the research participants. Coulthard (2014) argues that “the subjective realm of colonialism must be the target of strategic transformation along with the socioeconomic structure” (pg. 33). For Indigenous resurgent scholars like Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michael Wildcat, and Jeff Corntassel, the key to both structural and subjective transformation, particularly for Indigenous peoples, is decolonial praxis - the everyday enactment of Indigenous grounded normativities (Coulthard, 2014, Simpson, 2018). While these scholars focus on subjectivity transformation for Indigenous peoples, I am extending their logic by arguing that settlers must also undergo psychoaffective (subjective) transformation to help bring about decolonial futures.

I am a cis-gender, able-bodied, white settler with maternal ties to Williams Treaty territory in central Ontario that go back five generations. I have spent the past five years working in the conservation space, largely under the direction of Indigenous leadership. Most of the learning participants in the ENGO workshop series I am observing are also white settlers and we have been socialized to have similar onto-epistemologic orientations. We were raised embedded in a web of power relations that produced our subjectivities as colonizers - without our explicit knowledge or awareness. In return, we help to (re)produce and maintain colonial structures. As settlers in conservation, we tend to see a division between people/nature; we view parks are places for white, middle-class recreation; terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery are deeply engrained in our psyches; and parks with their emblematic landscapes and charismatic wildlife are an essential part of our identities as Canadians. Through our subjectivities as settler-conservationists, the violence of settler-colonialism and our participation in the continuing displacement of Indigenous peoples through our conservation practices is invisibilized.

In many ways, my project is as much an attempt to understand the participants as it is an attempt to understand myself, and how I have changed/am changing through my own decolonial praxis. I remember a conversation with my supervisor, Dr. Carla Rice, when she helped me understand that one of the central questions for my work is “who are we (as settlers) becoming?”. I am using autoethnography alongside participant observation to help illustrate the dynamic tension between wanting to support subjective change within the workshop participants and wanting to understand change within myself. Autoethnography is useful because it can “help foreground particular subjective knowledge” and is particularly attentive to affect, making “space for sensemaking that defies logic or sites outside language and sometimes conscious awareness” (Adams et al., 2021, pg. 5). To guide my autoethnographic practice, I will draw on Lugones’ (2003) concept of ‘faithful witnessing’ as part of decolonial feminist praxis - a concept that includes a “witnessing on the side of the oppressed and witnessing as the self-witness, the account of events, the witnessing of the process of witnessing, and the witness as human and nonhuman” (Fukushima, 2023, pg. 136). Decolonial feminisms from the global south tend to focus on epistemic resistance and transformation. It is through this process of layered witnessing, I hope to be able to identify and occupy what Lugones calls “decolonial cracks”, or liminal spaces within colonial structures where change may be possible. While I recognize resurgent critiques of recognition, I will try to be careful of the ways in which my gaze as a white settler may reify colonizer/colonized subjectivities in my research and practice. However, through engagement with decolonial feminists like Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldua, I will apply the concepts and practice of faithful witnessing in the hopes of demonstrating epistemic resistance. As argued by Fukushima, (2023), this is powerful because it demonstrates how “even memory can be part of decolonial struggle” (pg. 148).

Works Cited

Adams, T.E.; Holman Jones, S. & Ellis, C. (2021). Introduction – Making sense and taking action: Creating a caring community of Autoethnographers. In Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (Eds). Handbook of Autoethnography. Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429431760.

Bradbury, H.. (2015). Introduction: How to situate and define action research. In, Bradbury, H. (Ed). The SAGE handbook of action research, third edition. SAGE Publications.

Coulthard, G. (2014). Red skin, white masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. University of Minnesota Press.

Fukushima, A. I. (2023). A Multiplicity of Selves-in-Coalition: A Decolonial Feminist Witnessing Through Autoethnography. Feminist Formations, 35(1), 134–150. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2023.a902071.  

gzhibaeassigae jen meunier. (2019). Breath as research: Finding cracks in the wall. In Wilson, S. & Breen, A. (Eds). Research and Reconciliation : Unsettling Ways of Knowing Through Indigenous Relationships. Canadian Scholars.  

Hiller, C. (2017). Tracing the spirals of unsettlement: Euro-Canadian narratives of coming to grips with Indigenous sovereignty, title, and rights. Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 415–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1241209.

Lugones, M. 2003. Peregrinajes/pilgrimages: Theorizing coalitions against multiple oppressions. Rowman and Littlefield.

Ragan, P. (2011). Unsettling the settler within: Indian Residential Schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press.

Simpson, L.B. (2018). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. University of Minnesota Press.

Tuck, E. & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1-­‐40.

Whyte, K. (2018). Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice. Environment and Society, 9(1), 125–144. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090109.

Zembylas, M. (2018). Affect, race, and white discomfort in schooling: decolonial strategies for “pedagogies of discomfort.” Ethics and Education, 13(1), 86–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2018.1428714.