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Abstract

Rooted in a three-year (2018–2021) research collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers in Canada, this article asks: how do we use, adapt and remake methods developed in Euro-western contexts for very different geopolitical contexts, specifically Indigenous ones? How do we do this without minimizing the harms caused by Euro-western methods and epistemologies (some of which are ongoing) while providing ample space for Indigenous histories and approaches to knowledge-making and world-making? We detail how we used and adapted a feminist, relational, narrative data analysis approach – the Listening Guide – in two research projects, reflecting on how and why we made modifications. We expand three key points from the 2012 Live Methods Manifesto, while advancing two arguments about methods in this paper. First, we maintain that as all methods have histories and exist within geopolitical, socio-cultural, philosophical, ethical, epistemological and ontological contexts, they are neither static objects nor recipes that can be uniformly applied. We argue that the Listening Guide, often referred to as a singular approach, is in fact multiple. Second, we assert the ecological liveliness of methods in practice and in their specific contexts – their flow and flux, processes of becoming, relationalities and refusals, disturbances and renewals. This means that the Live Methods Manifesto must also be a living and constantly remade guide that is attentive to diverse research relationships, responsiveness, reflexivity and responsibilities through all phases of research, including pre- and post-research reflections.

Keywords

ecological methodologies Indigenous methodologies Indigenous-white settler research Listening Guide live methods

Introduction

More than two decades ago, in the first edition of Decolonizing Methodologies, Tuhiwai Smith (1999) famously stated that ‘“research,” is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary’ (p. 1; see also Tuhiwai Smith, 2021, p. 1). Since then, Indigenous methodologies, onto-epistemologies and cross-disciplinary fields of research by and for Indigenous peoples have slowly bloomed. Although Indigenous research approaches resonate somewhat with sociological and feminist methodologies, they also strongly emphasize the histories and specificities of Indigenous concepts, philosophies, ontologies, epistemologies, cosmologies, priorities and ethical research protocols. These unique elements create both challenges and opportunities for research projects that bring together white settler and Indigenous researchers. We ask three questions in this article: (1) How do we use, adapt and remake methods developed in Euro-western contexts for very different geopolitical contexts, specifically Indigenous ones? (2) How do we provide ample space for the distinct strengths of Indigenous approaches to knowledge-making without trivializing the harms that have been caused by Euro-western methods and epistemologies (some of which are ongoing)? (3) How do our reflections connect with and widen the Live Methods approach to cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural research (Back & Puwar, 2012)?

Our article is rooted in a three-year (2018–2021) research collaboration between an Indigenous community organization and a university research team comprised of a cross-generational group of Indigenous and white settler researchers; it included two connected projects on Indigenous care and work practices in an urban Canadian setting (i.e., Jewell et al., 2020, 2022) that combined community-based research, Indigenous methodologies and onto-epistemologies (i.e. Jewell, 2018), and feminist methodologies and ecological onto-epistemologies (i.e., Doucet, 2018b). This paper focuses on one part of this process: our adaptation of the Listening Guide – a feminist, relational, narrative analysis approach, which was developed in the United States in the early 1990s (Brown & Gilligan, 1992) and has been repeatedly modified for sociological projects (i.e., Doucet & Mauthner, 2008; Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, 2003). Although this method has been used in research with Indigenous populations (i.e., Elm et al., 2016; Walters et al., 2019), little attention has been given to its ethico-political, methodological and onto-epistemological dimensions in Indigenous contexts.

We advance two arguments about methods in this article. First, we assert that the Listening Guide, often referred to as a singular approach, is in fact multiple. We maintain that as all methods have histories and exist within geopolitical, socio-cultural, philosophical, ethical, epistemological and ontological contexts, they are neither static objects nor recipes that can be applied uniformly across all projects and contexts. We thus argue for more flexible understandings and applications of all methods, including the Listening Guide. Second, we connect with and expand three points from the Live Methods Manifesto (Back & Puwar, 2012): ‘Avoid the “trap of the now”’ (p. 8), ‘Engage political and ethical issues without arrogance or the drum roll of political piety’ (p. 14), and ‘Take time, think carefully and slowly’ (p. 13). Here, we argue for the ecological liveliness of methods in practice and in their specific contexts – their flux and flow, processes of becoming, relationalities and refusals, disturbances and renewals. This means that a Live Methods approach, broadly conceived, is entangled with these processes of constant revision, remaking and ‘composting’ (Haraway, 2016). Reflecting creatively and critically on our research practices, our article aims to deepen and widen some of the initial provocations of the Live Methods Manifesto and to call attention to the relevance of its insights for now and into the future.

We write this article in separate and blended voices, recognizing our own histories and positionalities as a diverse cross-generational team.¹ First, writing collectively, we detail our research collaboration and the projects that inform this article. The second and third sections of the article are written by one of us, Doucet, who has worked with and adapted the Listening Guide for many years; in these two sections, she briefly lays out a selected history and overview of its three principal versions and then describes her making of an ecological Listening Guide that she brought into our collaboration. Fourth, writing in a blended voice, we explain how we used Doucet’s version of the Listening Guide, and we demonstrate the role of ‘I poems’ in analysis and writing. Finally, our discussion section, written in three separate voices, connects our research experiences with and further develops three arguments from the Live Methods Manifesto about time, temporalities, relationalities in research processes and practices, and the politics and ethics of deep listening in all stages of research.

Building relationships

Our research story and collaboration began in 2018, when we embarked on a community-based project that aimed to understand Indigenous employment experiences. This project was initiated when the director of an Indigenous urban organization approached her local university with the aim of identifying potential researchers who could work with her community organization to address an issue that was affecting the population it served: high levels of Indigenous unemployment. This Indigenous organization (referred to as the Friendship Centre in this article) is located in a small city in the province of Ontario and mainly serves people from two of Canada’s three Indigenous groups: First Nations persons predominantly from Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities throughout Ontario, and Métis people.

Doucet, a white settler scholar who has participated in courses and workshops on Indigenous research practices and ethics, was invited to lead and seek funding for this project. She agreed to do so, on the condition that she could find an Indigenous researcher to lead or co-lead the project. Jewell, an Indigenous scholar with a long history of community-based Indigenous research in her home community, who had just completed her doctorate on Indigenous self-governance and cultural and political resurgence, joined Doucet to co-lead the project. Falk, our research associate, was a student in Doucet’s feminist methodologies class, where she had learned a little about Indigenous research methods and had used the Listening Guide in a class project.

As all Indigenous projects in Canada with academic institutional involvement, ours was guided by specific ethical and practice protocols (Government of Canada, 2018) and unfolded through a slow process of invitation and consultation. In 2018, we began consultations with Elders at the Friendship Centre and conversed with the director and various staff to gain a sense of how to proceed. Following the protocols guiding research with Friendship Centres, we then hosted a full day of ‘cultural competency training’, including a brief overview of the histories and current realities of Indigenous peoples in Canada and ongoing matters of reconciliation between Indigenous and white settler populations.

A Friendship Centre staff member joined our team and played a major role in recruiting local participants. Our four-person team together conducted a series of four focus groups/sharing circles with 21 Indigenous youth and adults. Jewell also conducted interviews with two employers (one private and one public sector) in the region. Our first project (see Jewell et al., 2020) led to a follow-up project on eldercare and workplace policies. Following a similar process, we met with staff and Elders at the same Friendship Centre to gain a sense of their priorities and questions related to eldercare issues. We then conducted two focus groups/sharing circles with nine individuals who were recruited through the Friendship Centre’s outreach work (see Jewell et al., 2022). For each project, we undertook two day-long data analysis sessions using Doucet’s adaption of the Listening Guide.

The Listening Guide: Histories and varied versions (Doucet)

The Listening Guide is a feminist relational narrative method and data analysis approach that was developed by Carol Gilligan, Lyn Mikel Brown, and students and colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education over a 10-year period, beginning in 1984 (see Brown & Gilligan, 1992). This method built partly on Gilligan’s (1982) well-known classic, In a Different Voice, which arguably launched the field of feminist care ethics; infused the Listening Guide with a focus on relationalities, including relational subjectivities; and called for a ‘mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract’ (p. 19). The Listening Guide continued to evolve throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with multiple influences, including emerging narrative approaches to understanding human lives; interpretive, hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches in the social sciences; connections between second wave feminism, consciousness-raising, and the development of feminist methods, methodologies and epistemologies that centred women, their marginalized voices and their positions as knowing subjects and subjects of knowledge-making (e.g., Code, 1991); and a ‘growing dissatisfaction with the nature of the coding schemes typically being used at that time to analyze qualitative data’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 157).

The Listening Guide was initially developed for use with interview transcripts in the disciplines of education and psychology (especially feminist and relational psychology). However, in the past few decades, it has been used, revised and adapted for different projects with diverse research populations (i.e., Alkhaled, 2021; Graziano et al., 2018) in numerous countries around the globe, and for varied forms of data (Fontaine et al., 2020; Kounine, 2013).

There have been three general variations of the Listening Guide, adaptations that each draw differently on wide interdisciplinary fields, including relational theories, feminist theories and methodologies, narrative theories, qualitative research methods and feminist epistemologies. These variations are (1) The Listener’s Guide (also referred to as a voice-centred, relational method) (see Brown & Gilligan, 1992), (2) The Listening Guide, as a primarily psychological method with a focus on contrapuntal voices (see Gilligan & Eddy, 2017; Gilligan et al., 2003), and (3) The Listening Guide, as a feminist, narrative, reflexive method with a more explicitly sociological and feminist epistemological focus (Doucet & Mauthner, 2008; Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, 2003).

There are some overlaps between these three approaches, two of which we note here. First, the Listening Guide involves multiple listenings/readings of interview transcripts and data and there is a deliberate focus on listening and reading as distinct modalities that draw on different sensory responses. For projects with interviews, the method entails at least four readings of the interview transcripts. Ideally, the same researchers conduct interviews and do the analytic work, re-listening to interview recordings to re-immerse themselves in the multi-sensory quality of the interview relationship. Group-based work guided by the view ‘that people have more than one way to tell a story and see a situation through different lenses and in different lights’ (Gilligan et al., 1990, p. 95) is the optimal approach to these readings.

Second, in all three Listening Guide approaches, the first two readings/listenings ‘are the “staples” of the method’ (Mauthner & Doucet, 1998, p. 131) or ‘are more prescribed’, whereas ‘the later listenings are shaped by the particular question the researcher brings to the interview’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 159) as well as by researchers’ disciplines, theories and epistemic communities. The first reading/listening is two-fold and focuses on story, narrative and plot. It also entails a reflexive reader response where the listener/reader asks: What is the story? How and why am I hearing that story? The second reading/listening focuses on the narrator’s voice, the ‘I’ who is speaking, and carefully attends to ‘how she speaks of herself before we speak of her’ (Brown & Gilligan, 1992, pp. 27–28). These I statements can demonstrate ‘a poetic cadence’ and ‘lead to I poems with each “I” starting a separate line of the poem and stanza breaks marking where the I shifts direction’ (Gilligan, 2015, p. 71). This ‘I’ reading also attends to shifts from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and ‘one’, as researchers have clarified that some cultures have multiple ways of thinking about these pronouns and self-identifiers (see Mauthner, 2016).

From the Listening Guide to a feminist ecological listening guide (Doucet)

When I began this collaboration, I had used the Listening Guide in multiple projects across many years, building mainly from the more sociologically based Listening Guide, but also adapting it further through my engagement with feminist ecological epistemologies, feminist science studies, feminist new materialism and decolonizing onto-epistemologies. This led me to consider, on one hand, both the histories and genealogies of the Listening Guide (see also Mauthner, 2017) and, on the other hand, how to apply it in practice, especially how to approach stories and narratives in light of my shifting epistemological, ontological and theoretical positionings (see Doucet, 2018a, 2018c). I could no longer claim to be using ‘the’ Listening Guide. Rather, I was using a Listening Guide rooted in several key principles that I gleaned from feminist ecological ethico-onto-epistemologies (e.g., Code, 2006) and from relational onto-epistemological approaches to narratives (e.g., Somers, 1994) and concepts (Somers, 2008).

These matters needed to be addressed carefully, respectfully and slowly in an Indigenous context. I thus entered this collaboration open to the unfolding, shared process of developing a Listening Guide. As we had to begin somewhere, I drafted an initial guide and have continued to rethink it at each phase, constantly making, remaking, composting and renewing it (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015).

To remake the Listening Guide, I thought about readings/listenings as well as steps, phases and processes. I built on the idea of four steps identified by Gilligan and Eddy (2017) and Gilligan et al. (2003): Step 1: Listening for the Plot; Step 2: I poems; Step 3: Listening for Contrapuntal Voices; Step 4: Composing an Analysis. With Tronto’s (2013) processes and phases of care in the back of my mind, I replaced the idea of steps with phases or processes, as these cohere with the ecological view that any object of investigation is in constant movement and that processes are more circular than linear, turning back into and blending with each other, always open to revision and reinterpretation. The phases and processes we followed occurred in different temporal moments, either separately, overlapping or simultaneously, and I have continued to revise these phases through my ongoing reflections with this article’s co-authors and recent team-based qualitative projects with diverse populations.

Phase 1: Situated knowledge-making

I deepened the initial reader-response element in the Listener’s Guide (Brown & Gilligan, 1992) and the attention to epistemic and biographical reflexivity in the sociological Listening Guide (Doucet & Mauthner, 2008; Mauthner & Doucet, 2003), taking a step back to focus on our situatedness before we embarked on data analysis, and then circled back to these reflections again in Phases 4 and 5. I adapted some of my reflexive questions from Indigenous Maori scholar Tuhiwai Smith (2014; see also Tuhiwai Smith, 2021):

1. How did you come to be here working with this community? Were you invited or did you select the community? What are the implications of being invited or doing the inviting? What intellectual, emotional, ethical, political and spiritual preparation have you had?

2. Who are your research communities? Who are your research ancestors? Who travels with you?

3. What baggage and background do you bring to this space? What hopes and possibilities do you bring into this space?

Phase 2: The core readings/listening (Readings 1 and 2) for story/narrative/plot and who is the storyteller/narrator

I maintained the two questions that are at the core of all three versions of the Listening Guide, with some attention to more-than-representational approaches to narrative (see Doucet, 2018c).

Reading/Listening 1: Story/plot and reflexivity

What are the stories and how am I hearing them?

1.1 Stories (plot and emplotment). Plot: What stories are being told? What are the key plot lines (and themes)? Emplotment: How and why is the narrator emplotting the way they are?

1.2 Reflexivity: Reflections on our ‘reader response’ to particular stories. Why am I hearing particular stories (and not others)? Do I have a specific response to some stories (and the people telling those stories)? Why and how? What draws me into some of the stories? How am I affecting and being affected by distinct stories?

Reading/Listening 2: Narrative identities and I poems

Who is the narrator? How do they speak about themselves and their social worlds? Who are the people (or the ‘characters’) in the stories being told? As with all versions of the Listening Guide, we trace ‘I’ statements made by specific participants to gain a different vantage point on the stories being told and we construct I poems.

Phase 3: Contexts and concepts (Readings/Listenings 3 and 4)

We adapted the third and fourth readings/listenings from the sociological Listening Guide approach and from my own recent developments of an ecological approach to narratives, concepts, and to the Listening Guide (Doucet, 2018a, 2018c).

Reading/Listening 3: Relational contexts: historical, socio-cultural and geopolitical narratives

What are the contexts that shape the stories being told? How do these relational contexts and historical, socio-cultural and geopolitical narratives frame and make possible the stories people tell? Are they present in the telling of these stories? Are participants aware of them? Do they draw attention to these contexts? Why or how? What histories and contexts make these stories possible?

Reading/Listening 4: Conceptual narratives

What conceptual narratives (dominant, emergent, resistant) are shaping the stories told/heard? How do the concepts and conceptual narratives that guide our research play a role in how we analyse the interviews? Are there competing concepts? What concepts make these stories possible? Are there new conceptual narratives that we can revision or reimagine?

Phase 4: Composing an analysis: I poems, contrapuntal voices, contexts and concepts (Doucet, Jewell and Falk)

Gilligan et al. (2003) highlight the process of composing an analysis and of tracing the text through multiple readings/listenings, ‘leaving a trail of underlinings, notes, and summaries each time’ to ‘[pull] together what has been learned about this person in relation to the research question’ (p. 168). I widened this to think not only about ‘this person’ but about the wider webs of relationships and relationalities within and between tellers and listeners and our dialogic, situated, contextual and conceptual positioning.

For the two projects that inform this article, we conducted six focus groups/sharing circles together. We also held two team data analysis sessions for each project, which involved doing the four readings, reading for I statements, and sharing these aloud. We recorded our conversations and Falk transcribed them, wrote up draft case studies, and constructed the first versions of I poems from several participants.

I poems

From the beginning of our collaboration, we were all strongly interested in reading for and making I poems. For Jewell, the voice-centred roots of the Listening Guide resonated with work on ‘felt theories’ (Million, 2009) and Indigenous storytelling (i.e., Archibald et al., 2019; Kovach, 2021). Falk remembered how powerful this reading was for her when she first came to the Listening Guide as an undergraduate student. For Doucet, what I poems had revealed about her research participants and research problematics had led to some of her most significant early contributions on gender divisions and relations of household and care work (i.e., Doucet, 2008; Mauthner and Doucet, 1998, 2003). At the same time, Doucet had lingering methodological, epistemological, ontological and practical questions: What would they do with the I poems after they made them? How would the I poems appear in their analysis (Phase 4) and writing (Phase 5)? How would they account for their multiple positionalities, which are part of their making processes? And are contrapuntal voices part of reading for I poems, part of the analysis, or both?

Contrapuntal voices

Gilligan et al. (2003) refer to listening for ‘contrapuntal voices’ as ‘hearing and developing an understanding of several different layers of a person’s expressed experience as it bears on the questioned posed’ (p. 164). They also note that these ‘contrapuntal voices do not have to be in opposition to one another; they may be opposing or complementary in some way. Listening for at least two contrapuntal voices takes into account that a person expresses his or her experience in a multiplicity of voices or ways’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 165).

Although we did not deliberately think about contrapuntal voices when we were working through our analysis, we realized in retrospect that we were doing so. Our approach to contrapuntal voices is, however, different from the one used in the second version of the Listening Guide developed by Gilligan et al. (i.e., Gilligan, 2015; Gilligan & Eddy, 2017; Gilligan et al., 2003), which centres psychological and psychoanalytic perspectives. They write, ‘I poems lay bare the associative logic of a particular psyche as it crosses a specific terrain’ and they narrate a ‘struggle between knowing and not knowing, between having and not having, a possible hidden desire’ (Gilligan & Eddy, 2017, p. 79). We drew instead on Mauthner and Doucet (1998), who allude to potential melodies of contrapuntal voices, ‘multi-layered voices, views and perspectives’ (p. 125). We also underlined our awareness that our positionings shaped the processes of dialogic and relational storytelling/listening and, in turn, how we heard and interpreted people’s stories and their ‘I’ and ‘we’ statements (see also Edwards & Weller, 2012). In short, we were aware that contexts and concepts mattered in the making of I poems. We illustrate some of our ‘composing an analysis’ process for a case study of one of our research participants.

Composing an analysis

In Phase 4 (Composing an analysis) of our data analysis process, we wove Megan’s long I poem (i.e., all of her I statements in the interview transcript) with our notes from previous phases. Specifically, we returned to our notes from Phase 1 (Situated knowledge-making) where the team’s white settler researchers (Doucet and Falk) learned from the Indigenous researchers (Jewell and our peer researchers from our Indigenous community partner) about past-present-future colonial impacts and how these mattered in care/work practices. Doucet and Falk also reflected on their own positionalities, considering how these mattered in how they were reading/listening and in their responsibilities as white settler researchers.

We also integrated our reflections from our reading/listening of Megan’s transcript in Phase 3 (Context and concepts) where we addressed historical, socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts and narratives. We asked: What are the contexts that shape Megan’s story? We identified five important points about Indigenous past-present contexts. First, many Indigenous peoples in Canada prefer to care for elderly family members at home (Habjan et al., 2012; Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres [OFIFC], 2016) – a preference rooted in broader Indigenous views opposing institutionalized care that stems from colonial histories of unjust care in institutions, especially in the residential schooling system, which has been widely recognized as perpetrating cultural genocide (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], 2015). Second, Indigenous communities share a recognition of the value of caring for Elders, and caregivers of Indigenous Elders have a unique cultural responsibility because caring for and revering individuals in this ‘stage of life’ (Anderson, 2011, p. 126) provides continuity and completes the circle in the life cycle model (OFIFC, 2016). Third, Indigenous people have a shorter life expectancy and more often experience declining health in their fifties compared to non-Indigenous Canadians; this has been attributed to the ongoing consequences of colonization, including ‘[d]iminished life expectancy, disproportional burden of chronic disease and communicable illness, addictions, and social violence’ (Reading, 2018, p. 3). A fourth point is that there is a culture of overworked and underpaid caregivers in private eldercare institutions, and fifth, care responsibilities in Indigenous cultures and wider Canadian society continue to be highly gendered. We could have viewed this latter point as a problem, but we recognized the need to approach it differently because of the well documented histories of multi-sectoral Canadian institutions robbing individuals, families and communities of caring for loved ones (i.e., Watts, 2022).

In our fourth reading, we reflected on our conceptual narratives: How do the concepts and conceptual narratives that guide our research play a role in how we analyse these stories and tell our scholarly narratives? Recognizing that concepts have histories and relationalities, values and norms, we acknowledged the invisibility and/or absence of Indigenous perspectives and experiences in theoretical and empirical scholarly research and that concepts and practices of care have been developed in Euro-western contexts (Doucet et al., 2024). We thus aimed to rethink dominant conceptual narratives about paid and unpaid work.

Writing this article is part of the fifth phase of our analytic work (Crafting narratives). As there are always many scholarly narratives to tell, we reflected throughout all phases of our analysis on what narratives we would craft. We decided to adopt a strength-based and ‘desire-based approach’ (Tuck, 2009, p. 416) rooted in centring Indigenous survival, presence, and futures (Jewell, 2018). Below, we craft a short narrative about Megan, who participated in our second project on paid work and unpaid eldercare work.

Phase 5: Crafting narratives: Our responsibilities (ethical, ontological, epistemological) as listeners and knowledge makers (Doucet, Jewell and Falk)

In our writing process, we ask a series of questions: How and why am I emplotting the way that I am? Why am I telling this scholarly narrative and not that scholarly narrative? How will I write this narrative? To whom am I responsible for this narrative? How do those responsibilities shape what and how I write? What are the wider political dimensions that shape the scholarly and public narratives that we will tell? What are the possible effects of the public and scholarly narratives we tell?

Crafting a narrative about care and work

One of the narratives we craft is about Megan, a 35-year-old Indigenous (First Nations) woman. In a focus group/sharing circle that we conducted in the spring of 2019, Megan told us that when she was 25, she returned home to live with her parents and attended college to train as a personal support worker (PSW). She explained that these were interconnected decisions. Her parents were facing health challenges and she wanted to know how to care for them. She also wanted to be employed in eldercare. This was how she began her decade-long journey of paid and unpaid care work, working mainly night shifts in a private nursing home and caring for her mother at home by day.

We identified two contrapuntal voices in the long I poem that we constructed from Megan’s contributions in one of our focus groups; these voices were simultaneously opposing and complementary. First, Megan voiced her experiences of being both a responsive, selfless, self-determined caregiver who makes contextually informed choices (self-in-community), and a stretched, stressed caregiver who has lost autonomy and control in her life (self-lost). We named these counterpoints Care and self: Self-in-community and Self-lost (i.e., a self, lost in care). Second, Megan spoke at length about the differences in care cultures between ‘mainstream’ workplaces and Indigenous ones. We identified these as: Care cultures: Care-centred and Care-less.

I poem (1) Self-in-community: ‘I felt better knowing that she was at home’

Megan’s sense of being a selfless caregiver is revealed in her discussion about taking on eldercare as her taken-for-granted generational and gendered responsibility. She also expressed that she did not want her mother to be in a nursing home (public or private institutional care):

Even when caring for my mom,

even though it was hard

I felt better knowing that she was at home.

I did work in a nursing home

So I know the setting,

I’ve seen residents fight.

I was happy to know that she was at home

And that she was safe

And that she was still keeping her dignity.

My dad says that my family doesn’t live very long.

[they] have passed away in their 60s. . .

I’ve never seen them. . .

Always in the back of my head was the same. . . thinking

‘I’m not going to have them (my parents) one day.’

I wanted to do as much as I can. . .

I didn’t have any resentment towards my brother,

I just felt like it was my responsibility.

I always felt like since I was the girl, too,

it was my responsibility.

Like I was more of the caregiver

because of. . .

I’m a woman.

I poem (2) Self-lost and care-less care: ‘So I just didn’t say anything’

To care for her parents during the day, Megan switched to working night shifts. She expressed extreme fatigue from her job as a PSW at the nursing home, where she received little support or accommodation for her family caregiving responsibilities:

I didn’t have much time

And I felt like, you just want a day off,

you can’t always call in sick because the places I worked at,

they were more mainstream,

they never offered sick days or nothing like that.

I had less patience if I was over-exhausted or tired.

I would probably get like 4 hours of sleep.

It was hard but I just did it, you know. . .

I didn’t even think about it,

I just did it.

I’ve been mainstream my entire life.

I worked for a very big corporation

and a nursing home at the same time.

If I called in sick

I felt like I was going to get yelled at,

or penalized in some way.

So, I just didn’t say anything.

I felt like if I called in

I just let everyone down.

I just had to go in

because there was no one else. . .

I was just stuck in that go-go-go attitude.

I would just get up, go in, erase everything,

and just deal with what’s in front of me. . .

I’m sure I could have done something,

but I just didn’t.

. . . I had talked to one of the supervisors. . .

and she gave me a very hard time taking the next day off.

Like I had just flat out came and told them,

‘My dad just went to the hospital today,

I need to take tomorrow off’

And it was a very big deal.

I could not take the day off for that.

I couldn’t do it.

I don’t know

I felt like it was, you feel like

you don’t want to say

that you’re caregiving for someone,

you’d rather just say, ‘oh, I’m sick,’

instead of actually saying the truth

because you feel like

you’re going to get a hard time about it

from a corporation

I poem (3) Moving from self-lost to self-in-community, from care-less to care-centred: ‘I just had to get out of mainstream’

One of our research questions was to explore differences between working for what research participants referred to as a ‘mainstream’ workplace (i.e., settler Canadian-led profit-focused institutions with limited care policies) and an Indigenous community organization (such as a Friendship Centre). Megan’s I poems revealed stark differences between her experiences of working for a private nursing home and for an Indigenous organization.

I was at the breaking point where

I just had to get out of mainstream,

I just had to get out and go somewhere else-

that kind of feeling.

And then I applied there

and it was just the best day of my life getting hired

because it’s just a very different mindset.

It feels like family.

They just care about their employees

I can just be myself.

Talk to my coworkers like normal.

It’s a very different mindset there.

And really just being Indigenous,

I just thought,

Oh, it would be kind of nice to work with my people.

I feel that since I’ve been working there

I’m on a schedule.

I never really had that before,

it was kind of up and down.

But now I do.

Discussion

Looking back on our research processes, we connect with the Live Methods Manifesto and share some of our reflections and expansions on three of its ‘provocations’ (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 6).

‘Avoid the “trap of the now”’ and ‘Engage political and ethical issues without arrogance or the drum roll of political piety’

Jewell: Past-present-future colonial geopolitical contexts: In my many years of research with and for Indigenous communities, and as an Anishinaabe woman who grew up in her First Nation and remains connected with this place and community, I have relied heavily on my lived, experiential, and felt knowledge (Million, 2009). The relationality between me and research participants is not an ‘access point’, but rather a responsibility from and for these knowledges. ‘Avoiding the “trap of the now”’ was a critical consideration for me when we brought a Listening Guide into an Indigenous research site.

Some historical background might be helpful to international readers of this article. Recently, Canadian governments (at provincial and federal levels) have finally recognized that the Indian Residential Schools system, which forcibly removed children from parents and communities over a period of 150 years, amounted to assimilation and cultural genocide (TRC, 2015) and was ‘wrong’. Yet, confining this acknowledgement to past injustices against Indigenous peoples and their children denies their continued effects in the present as well as the many injustices Indigenous peoples in Canada still endure through current child removal policies. Like all settler colonial states, Canada’s existence has depended on the genocide and erasure of Indigenous peoples and their Nations (Wolfe, 2006). This fact is still a present reality, known and felt in our worlds as Indigenous peoples. Apologies from governments have thus been partial and unfulfilling, they ‘inaugurated in a formal sense, a time of “reconciliation,” when the difficult past would be reconciled to the present even as that past itself remains structured through a geopolitical dispossession, starvation, death, and ongoing legal forms of dispossession manifest in law such as the Indian Act’ (Simpson, 2013, p. 439).

Indigenous peoples, by our very existence, embody resistance to the ‘trap of the now’. This can pose challenges when white settler researchers attempt to work with Indigenous researchers who are living in a past-present-future colonial geopolitical context while striving for the possibility of ‘otherwise worlds’ (King et al., 2020, p. 7). Instructing white settlers on possible otherwise worlds, sharing these and reflecting on them, goes well beyond traditional practices of reflexive positioning in research projects. These are profoundly political, personal, ethical, ontological and epistemological endeavours.

I was drawn to the Listening Guide when I was first introduced to it in our research process. I recognized its relational power to hear and understand personal narratives within layers of social, cultural and political contexts, and its potential to honour the felt experiences of community members – felt experiences that are intricately connected to ongoing geopolitical histories. I also knew that I would need to deeply consider what it means to use a method developed in a Euro-western context within an Indigenous context and to think about how we would create spaces for these ethical and political reflections.

Doucet: Thinking ecologically about methods and method ecologies: Coming into this partnership, I was fully cognizant that I needed to give space for Eva Jewell to think through how this process was working for her, to express what was uncomfortable or misaligned with Indigenous world views and the needs of her wider community, and what aspects of the work would require more discussion or adaptation. I added two new phases to our research process, but that was just a starting point. I knew that we would need to think more critically about time, temporalities, politics and method.

As an ecological thinker, my focus is always on movement, diversity, flow, change and becoming. Thinking ecologically about method means, for me, many different things, including embracing relational ontologies (what something is, does and becomes is constituted and constituting within a wide array of intra-affective contexts and habitats and relational entanglements); multiple ontologies (plurality and multiplicity rather than singularity in data, stories, concepts, realities and worlds); the ethico-politics of knowledge-making (if realties are multiple, then we make decisions in research and work with entanglements of ethico-politico-onto-epistemologies); and the liveliness of all things – how they are constantly ‘affecting and being affected’ (Code, 2006, p. 26) through processes of becoming. Thinking ecologically in this project led me away from the idea of ‘the’ Listening Guide towards seeing this method as more fluid, as ‘a’ Listening Guide or plural Listening Guides. Like all living things, what a method is and does changes in different contexts.

Our conversations about living methods facilitated my thinking about method ecologies and about how ecologies are not always smooth and harmonious. Our team of Indigenous and white settler researchers had already reflected on how thinking with care and feminist care ethics means sometimes embracing ‘refusal’, not as a ‘prohibitive stance’ but ‘a generative orientation’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 238), and accepting ‘relational autonomy’ (Friedman, 2003) (see Doucet et al., 2024), which calls for both connection and distance. Thinking ecologically also requires understanding ‘disturbance-based ecologies’, where ecological disturbance is not about damage but about living together ‘without either harmony or conquest’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 5). Although ecological disturbance is a ‘beginning’, there is no ‘harmonious state before disturbance’ – it is a flow, where disturbances ‘follow other disturbances’ and ‘disturbance is ordinary’ (p. 160). As Tsing (2015) writes:

As an analytic tool, disturbance requires awareness of the observer’s perspective – just as with the best tools in social theory. Deciding what counts as disturbance is always a matter of point of view. . . . Disturbance is never a matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no’; disturbance refers to an open-ended range of unsettling phenomena. . . . With disturbance, this is always a problem of perspective, based, in turn, on ways of life. (p. 161; emphasis added).

These matters of disturbance apply to any manifesto, including the Live Methods Manifesto, in which ‘disturbance is ordinary’. The stories we tell about live methods and method ecologies ‘should never end, but rather lead to further stories’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 287).

‘Take time, think carefully and slowly’

Doucet: Slow relationships, slow methods: The Listening Guide is a slow method.² Its varied versions each took decades to develop. Its multiple readings/listenings are conducted slowly in groups and there is an implicit assumption that researchers are actively engaged in both the interview and analysis processes. Its early iteration as a ‘voice-centered relational method’ highlighted voice, in the sense of a literal, embodied voice (Gilligan & Eddy, 2017), and emphasized researchers’ relationships with themselves, the research team, research participants, epistemic communities and readers. Attending to voice and relationships takes time. It compels researchers to ‘rethink the relationship between time and scholarship’ and to push back against the dominant ‘regimes of audit and measuring’ and the ‘frenzied rhythm of research assessment exercises’ (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 13). Listening, however, does not guarantee good research. Like methods, stories are alive through their multiple tellings and hearings. Listening is always a partial, situated, multiple, layered and ethico-political act (Back, 2007, 2012).

Jewell : Research processes as gifts in the making: In reflecting on slow modes of research, I recall Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (2013) retelling of how Anishinaabe received maple syrup. What we learn from the Anishinaabe canon is that the gift of syrup is not only the sweet product itself, but the processes of tapping, gathering and boiling sap. Rendering maple sap into syrup using original methods is a slow process, and in the wide spans of ‘idle’ boiling time, there is visiting, sharing, helping, and anticipating what will come next. We learn from the Anishinaabe canon that our hero trickster intentionally made the work of making maple syrup slow to create more space for relationality. It is the relational part of the process that is most important; this is the space where we learn, visit, feel joy, provide and receive care, and tend to the needs of the process. As Simpson’s titular volume reminds us, ‘the gift is in the making’. In contrast to a neoliberal and capitalist emphasis on urgent production – the deliverable, the output, the finding – the Listening Guide spoke partly to my interest in slow process and in remaking methods for Indigenous contexts. I’m interested in how the intrinsic value of the process of producing research outputs will be honoured, and how they will benefit communities who may not have, nor desire, access to repositories where research products are kept.

Falk: Making I poems as process, not product: As the student researcher collaborating on this project, I took part in all phases of the research process, including transcribing the sharing circle/focus group interviews. Transcribing is sometimes viewed as a tedious menial task. Even with transcribing software, it took many hours, and it was difficult to transcribe the overlapping voices in sharing circle recordings. This process involves multiple listenings to ensure accuracy of wording. Working intensely with the transcripts deepened my understanding of the stories and made the work of creating I poems even more powerful and meaningful for me.

Following our team data analysis process of working through multiple readings of the interview transcripts, we chose a few participants as a focus for case studies and I poems, which were created from the I readings we had done (Phase 2 of our process). I wrote up the case studies and produced first drafts of the I poems. Making I poems was a slow process of completing a series of steps thoroughly described in varied writing on the Listening Guide (see, for example, Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Gilligan et al., 2003; Mauthner & Doucet, 1998).

In a nutshell, I marked every first-person ‘I’ spoken by the subject in a transcript, ‘along with the associated verbs and any seemingly important accompanying words’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 162). I then copied these words in sequence, forming ‘I’ statements on separate lines. Gilligan et al. (2003) explain that through this process, the statements form poetic stanzas that often capture central themes explicitly or implicitly stated by the participants (see also Koelsch, 2015). Removing the rest of the text and focusing on first-person statements ‘moves this aspect of subjectivity to the foreground, providing the listener with the opportunity to attend just to the sounds, rhythms, and shifts in this person’s usages of “I”’ (Gilligan et al., 2003, p. 163).

As I reflected on my experiences of making I poems in our collaborations, the idea of ‘seemingly important accompanying words’ was not straightforward for me. Recent work has contrasted ‘sparse’ and ‘full’ I poems. McKenzie (2021) outlines some benefits and drawbacks of both methods, noting that whereas sparse I poems can simplify stories and contexts, I poems with longer stanzas can read like interview transcripts and lose their power of poetic enquiry. Considering these points as I crafted the first version of our I poems, I made the decision to include longer lines of text and sometimes start with words other than ‘I’ to maintain context. This approach seemed especially important in this Indigenous research collaboration because I wanted to ensure that all contexts were fully conveyed, rather than assumed. Moreover, our strength-based and ‘desire-based’ approach, combined with how we wanted to centre Indigenous concepts and practices (see Jewell et al., 2022), translated into my felt responsibilities as a white settler researcher and my slow crafting of I poems.

Jewell: Slowing down and lightening the load for Indigenous researchers: In the Live Methods Manifesto, Back and Puwar (2012) express the importance of taking time to ‘think carefully and slowly’, particularly in the academy, where research outputs are sped up, ‘leaving very little room for failure or open-ended research’ (p. 14). The antidote, of course, is to ‘provoke ways of interrupting this rushed temporality’ (p. 14). Although this sentiment is showing up in the literature, calling upon academics to consider pausing their frenzy to publish, to slow down and better appreciate the process, it seems to be quite difficult to convince white settler researchers, who are always rushing in their research practices and behaviours, that a slower pace is beneficial. And who could blame them? The urgency of the ‘publish or perish’ credo is quite literally systematized in academia.

Perhaps, then, this would be a good space to be more instructive. Wherever there are white settler scholars moving slowly with care, doing meaningful research with humility and self-awareness, taking the time to really consider their impact on their work, I think: ‘You need to teach three more white researchers how to do that!’ And you need to do more of what we are doing here, which is detailing your/our process and remaking Euro-western-made methods to account for the real and ongoing harms of epistemic violence. You need to feel the disturbances all the way through and give space and time for processing these disturbances, especially where they are deeply uncomfortable. Having a greater number of existing (and up and coming) white settler scholars committed to working more intentionally in this way can help mitigate the harms of research, instruct others, and interrupt white supremacy and the colonial tactics of epistemic violence. There is a limit to what we, as Indigenous scholars and racialized scholars, can do to instruct our colleagues – not to mention our students. As a junior, femme, Indigenous scholar, I can articulate it, I can talk about it all, I can impress upon you why it is important. But there’s just something that can’t be heard unless others – white settler scholars who are dominant in the academy – join us in really understanding and rethinking how we approach and practise methods, knowledge-making, deep listening and world-making.

Conclusion

This article explores how we used and adapted a feminist, relational, narrative data analysis approach – the Listening Guide – in two research projects with Indigenous communities. We reflect on three key points from the 2012 Live Methods Manifesto that speak to geopolitical histories and past-present continuities: politico-ethical issues in relational collaborative research and deep listening; and the need for more attention to slow research. The Manifesto for Live Methods also identifies ‘a need to see the larger picture, temporally but also geo-politically, without which it becomes difficult to undertake the epistemic work of developing a sociological imagination that moves between personal anxieties to large, impersonal social conditions’ (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 8). For our team of Indigenous and white settler researchers exploring Indigenous-defined research matters, this temporal and geopolitical work was indeed simultaneously epistemic, personal, political, and deeply humbling. It also recognized our shared and markedly different histories and acknowledged how these mattered in, and disturbed, our multiple present(s) as well as our process of unsettling and remaking the Listening Guide approach to data analysis.

Guided by our Indigenous community partner and Jewell’s experience working with Indigenous community-based research, we began and carried out our research on Indigenous conceptions and practices of care and engaged in slow and respectful relationship building (see Daigle, 2019; Gaudet, 2019). This meant being more patient, slowing our pace, and honouring the palpable political dimension of our collaboration. It is important to mention that Canadian multi-sectoral research guidelines (i.e., Government of Canada, 2018) stipulate that research must be done with and for Indigenous communities and in response to stated needs or concerns of one of Canada’s three main Indigenous groups. Our research thus recognized the specific temporalities in Indigenous research, the responsibilities held by white settler researchers and the wider implications of thinking about researcher responsibilities in all research sites.

Our project also highlights researchers’ unique responsibilities when working on Indigenous research projects. We agree with the Live Methods Manifesto’s view that sociological research ‘has a public responsibility to pay attention to vulnerable and precarious lives’ (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 14); yet we also acknowledge the enormous complexity of relational research processes, especially when pain and suffering are at their core. We specifically highlight the points made by Gunaratnam (2012) in her contribution to the first Live Methods special issue. From her research on migrants’ illness and dying, she highlights two important methodological insights: ‘(1) attentiveness to a range of different materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging and communication can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material and the temporally linear and (2) the cultivating of an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and the non-relational’ (Gunaratnam, 2012, p. 120). Here, we draw attention to another form of inaccessibility, non-relationality and ‘refusal’ gleaned from our research. The histories and politics of Indigenous research in Canada demand a ‘refusal’ to ‘[collect] pain narratives [which] . . . are so prevalent in the social sciences’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, p. 227). This refusal is ‘multidimensional’ and can include refusals enacted by communities, the researched and researchers through both large and small acts, such as making ‘visible settler colonial knowledge’ or simply ‘turning off the tape recorder’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, pp. 244–245).

Building from the Live Methods approach of centring concepts and processes of time and temporality, our research calls attention to the need for an even longer timeframe – thinking across past, present and future time – in research with and for Indigenous people. Indeed, we believe that more time and space should be built into all projects for reflecting on the ongoing ethico-political liveliness of methodological, epistemological, ontological and ethical questions and processes. To place ‘ethical judgement at the centre of research craft’ (Back & Puwar, 2012, p. 15) is an act of care that requires attention to relationships, responsiveness, reflexivity and responsibilities through all phases of research, including a post-reflection phase. This means interrogating funding guidelines and processes as well as the markers and measures of ‘good’ research; how we listen; how we work with and remake methods; how we collaborate with others, compose analyses and craft narratives; how (and why and for whom) we make knowledges; and if and how we intervene in the making of possible ‘otherwise worlds’.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported mainly by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Partnership Grant (file numbers: SSHRC 895-2018-4005 and CIHR 159066) with Principal Investigator Allison Williams,as well as the SSHRC Canada Research Chairs Program (file number 231901–2018),and a SSHRC Partnership Grant (file number 895–2020-1011),Principal Investigator Andrea Doucet.

ORCID iD

Andrea Doucet

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Deep listening,slow relationships,world-making: Indigenous and feminist ecological reflections on the Listening Guide and the Live Methods Manifesto

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Building relationships

The Listening Guide: Histories and varied versions (Doucet)

From the Listening Guide to a feminist ecological listening guide (Doucet)

Phase 1: Situated knowledge-making

Phase 2: The core readings/listening (Readings 1 and 2) for story/narrative/plot and who is the storyteller/narrator

Reading/Listening 1: Story/plot and reflexivity

Reading/Listening 2: Narrative identities and I poems

Phase 3: Contexts and concepts (Readings/Listenings 3 and 4)

Reading/Listening 3: Relational contexts: historical, socio-cultural and geopolitical narratives

Reading/Listening 4: Conceptual narratives

Phase 4: Composing an analysis: I poems, contrapuntal voices, contexts and concepts (Doucet, Jewell and Falk)

I poems

Contrapuntal voices

Composing an analysis

Phase 5: Crafting narratives: Our responsibilities (ethical, ontological, epistemological) as listeners and knowledge makers (Doucet, Jewell and Falk)

Crafting a narrative about care and work

I poem (1) Self-in-community: ‘I felt better knowing that she was at home’

I poem (2) Self-lost and care-less care: ‘So I just didn’t say anything’

I poem (3) Moving from self-lost to self-in-community, from care-less to care-centred: ‘I just had to get out of mainstream’

Discussion

‘Avoid the “trap of the now”’ and ‘Engage political and ethical issues without arrogance or the drum roll of political piety’

‘Take time, think carefully and slowly’

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

References