Positionality,relationality,place,and land: Considerations for ethical research with communities

Abstract

Attention to researcher positionality is an important component of qualitative research, particularly in research done with and for communities. However, discussions of researcher positionality are often limited in that they narrowly focus on positionality with respect to human research participants and whether the researcher is an insider or outsider. In this article, I build with the contributions of Indigenous scholarship to make a methodological argument for broadening our notions of positionality to consider relationality with respect to place and land. Relationality is a core tenet across many Indigenous epistemologies and research methodologies, and refers to the interconnected and mutually constitutive relationships between people and land. I argue that building and participating in relationships with land—as a core methodological consideration in qualitative research—can catalyze new possibilities for ethical research in which researchers are answerable to complex social and ecological relations in the places where they live and work.

Introduction

Recognizing the often harmful and extractive legacies of the social sciences and academic research more broadly, a growing number of researchers are taking up questions around the ethics of doing research in, with, and for diverse communities (Paris and Winn, 2014; Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022; Tuck, 2009). Emerging from these longstanding discussions is an increasing recognition of the need for researchers to weave consideration of positionality into their work, and to build meaningful and reciprocal relationships with communities. In this article, I highlight and draw on Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies to further contribute to this discussion and make an argument for centering relations with place and land in research—not necessarily as the focus of inquiry, but as fundamental to the process of inquiry. By this, I mean working to intentionally enter into right relations with land just as one might work to enter into right relations with human research participants. After reviewing discussions of positionality and relationality as key tenets of ethical research, as well as scholarship on place and land as instrumental in shaping human activity, I consider what possibilities might emerge if researchers take seriously their obligations to place and land.

These arguments for centering place and land in research emerge from my own standpoint as a Palestinian researcher born and currently living in what is now known as the United States. I come from a long lineage of fallaheen, or peasant farmers, whose livelihoods are dependent on reciprocal relations with land. Land is a central tenet in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, and sumud, or steadfastness, has long been a defining feature of Palestinians’ collective identity stemming from our rootedness in land. Like the lands of North America, Palestine has also been harmed by colonialism, with deep ties linking American and Israeli settler projects (Barakat, 2018; Khalidi, 2020; Salaita, 2016). Sumud takes on new meaning in the face of settler colonialism's contemporary manifestations in Palestine, from ongoing home demolitions, attacks on olive orchards, and restrictions on movement as part of a broader project of dispossession. While there are many differences in various Native American and Palestinian sovereignty struggles, there are also striking connections (Salaita, 2016). This has in part inspired my commitment to engage with Indigenous onto-epistemologies as visitor living on unceded Indigenous lands in California. Drawing from this positionality, and building with Indigenous epistemologies, I offer a vision to consider how qualitative researchers might work to be in better relation with respect to land as part of a more ethical research practice.

To begin this article, I first review the imperative of conducting research with communities rather than on communities. This requires attention to positionality and reflexivity, and provides a context from which new research practices—such as the writing of positionality statements—have emerged. After exploring the strengths and limitations of such practices, I then turn to Indigenous conceptualizations of relationality to more fully draw out what it means to do ethical research grounded in relationships not just with human research participants, but with place and land. I then review the role of place in social science research before synthesizing these ideas to suggest that researchers’ relationships with place and land ought to be further considered with respect to positionality. Ultimately, I suggest that building intentional relationships with land can not only enrich and strengthen scholarship, but can also ground research in principles of care as an ethical imperative.

Research ethics in the social sciences

Across disciplines in the social sciences, from sociology, to education, to public health, and beyond, there exists a wide range of approaches to research that aim to disrupt dominant power dynamics between researchers and the communities in which we work. Common across these approaches—which are often characterized as participatory or community-engaged research—are commitments to collaborative and equitable partnerships across multiple phases of the research process in which researchers work with and for communities. ¹ While interrelated and sharing many features in common with one another, different forms of community-engaged research have distinct theoretical and methodological foundations, such as participatory action research (Whyte, 1991) and community-based participatory research (Israel et al., 2005). Wallerstein and Duran (2003: 25) describe how these approaches can be traced to two different traditions: the Northern tradition, focusing on “collaborative utilization-focused research with practical goals of system improvement,” and the Southern tradition, focusing on “openly emancipatory research, which challenges the historical colonizing practices of research and political domination of knowledge by the elites.”

Here, Wallerstein and Duran (2003) importantly mention the historical colonizing practices of research and the political domination of knowledge. These legacies are pervasive across the social sciences, which have long played an active role in justifying and perpetuating colonialism as well as many other linked systems of oppression. “Research,” as a result, has been rendered a dirty word in many communities that have been harmed by these systems (Tuck and Yang, 2014). When researchers begin building the relationships necessary for their studies, they bring with them the history of their particular research institution as well as other researchers, broadly. These relationships between researchers and participants then unfold within said historical and institutional context of trust or mistrust (Wallerstein and Duran, 2003). Recognizing these histories and how they manifest in the present, Patel (2014) makes the argument that researchers are “answerable” to the deep and intertwined trajectories of the academy, settler colonialism, anti-Blackness. Answerability refers to the responsibilities we have as research to steward knowledge with regards to communities, rather than claim ownership to said knowledge as property.

Qualitative researchers in particular have increasingly taken up the call to work against longstanding power asymmetries between researchers and communities (Paris and Winn, 2014; Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022). A core tenet of qualitative research, after all, is to highlight the stories of research participants in their own words. Working toward this, however, is laden with ethical issues. Ethical research practices include but extend far beyond formal legal requirements for studies with human subjects. Conducting ethical research requires careful, iterative, and reflexive attention to dynamics of interaction and engagement across the research process. Even for studies that might not be explicitly characterized as participatory or community-engaged, it is becoming more widely recognized that attention to the process of how researchers engage with communities involves issues of power (Thapar-Björkert and Henry, 2004). Consideration of researcher positionality and relationality offers an opportunity to undo legacies of extractive social science research and support more ethical and reciprocal partnerships between researchers and communities.

Positionality

Discussions of researcher positionality in the social sciences have emerged partly in relation to the ethical dimensions of scholarly inquiry . Broadly, positionality refers to the ways in which researchers’ perspectives and stances are rooted in experiences that emerge from their particular social locations—often along lines of race, gender, and class—in connection to the specific context of their study (Rowe, 2014). This concept draws largely from feminist research traditions that reject notions of research as an objective, neutral, or value-free practice as it has been conventionally understood in dominant scientific paradigms (Collins, 1997; Davies, 2023; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Rose, 1997), instead recognizing how our standpoints inherently provide a lens for making sense of the world around us.

Conversations about what it means to do research as an insider or outsider (effectively, considering one's positionality) have long occurred among qualitative researchers, and specifically ethnographers. Belonging to a particular community can offer unique insights for doing research with said community, while also coming with a set of challenges. For instance, a researcher may already come to a project with a better, more thorough understanding of local customs and practices and with an existing foundation of trust. However, the same researcher might now need to negotiate the competing demands of one's dual role as a researcher and community member if other community members have particular expectations for what role the researcher will play in community life. In reality, being an insider or outsider with respect to a particular community is too binary of a lens for conceptualizing researcher-participant relationships given the complexity and dynamism of cultures and communities (Collins, 1986; Dwyer and Buckle, 2009; Merriam et al., 2001; Paris and Winn, 2014). Community, for this reason, can often be a problematic term when it is employed vaguely. Furthermore, researcher and research participants’ positionalities—as well as the power dynamics between them—are complex, nuanced, and evolve and shift over time, thus requiring ongoing attention (Schulz, 2021; Thapar-Björkert and Henry, 2004).

Issues of positionality show up frequently in our methodological approaches. Notably, qualitative researchers do not just collect data—we produce data through our relationships “such that the data collector is explicit in the data themselves” (Small and Calarco, 2022: 12). This process imbued with ethical dilemmas concerned with power (Krystalli, 2020). San Pedro and Kinloch (2017), for instance, critique dominant approaches to interview research as extractive, “where only one story is being revealed in the absence of another.” They offer "critical storying" as an alternative approach, which is described as a process where both researcher and research participants interweave and merge stories together in a relational process. Others, like Martinez (2016), discuss the positionality of research tools. In the context of highly surveilled populations—such as Black and Latinx youth in schools—the presence of audiovisual recording equipment evokes technologies of surveillance as part of a broader project of discipline, punishment, and control. This merits further interrogation, argues Martinez (2016), of both the ethics and implications of how our research tools shape activities in the settings we study.

This interrogation is a key component of reflexivity. Reflexivity concerns the researcher's conscious self-understanding of the research process and their role in it, and is a strategy employed in which the researcher can manage the “analytical oscillation” between observation and theory (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Wainwright, 1997). In other words, reflexivity is both a state of mind and set of actions regarding the researchers’ influence vis-a-vis what is being studied (Probst and Berenson, 2014). In such research, the researcher takes a negotiated stance where they create dialogue with community members through context-based interpretation and portrayal of knowledge (Fine, 1994). Reflexive researchers consider who they are in relation to those studied as this has an effect on the data being produced and how it is interpreted (Berger, 2015; Small and Calarco, 2022). For example, researchers’ background knowledge and tacit belief inform which observations are worthy of annotation during the writing of ethnographic fieldnotes (Wolfinger, 2002). It is impossible to eliminate these subjectivities; rather identifying them and monitoring them in relation to the research—and doing so transparently—is incumbent on the researcher (Merriam and Tisdell, 2015). Furthermore, eliminating these subjectivities need not be a goal. Theorizing from one's positionality or standpoint can actually enrich research by providing a valid source of knowledge from which to layer in new insights, as argued by Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins (1986).

When researchers make their positionalities explicit, and reflexively attend to how their positionality informs the research, it can provide readers with greater transparency and understanding about the context from which claims are made. As a result, it has become increasingly common for researchers to include positionality statements in their research. This can be a powerful practice. However, as Bang and Vossoughi (2016: 177) point out, “attention to researchers’ positionalities is not a routine checklist of identity focused on representational diversity.” Writing positionality statements runs the risk of becoming a box-checking exercise for researchers, in which laying out the dimensions of our identities (as if identities were static and stable traits) is something done out of a sense of obligation for publication and without the deep, ongoing, and iterative consideration required as part of reflexivity. These sorts of statements may provide information as to who the researcher is, but often do little to inform readers if and how the researcher's positionality shaped the work of the study. To address this, researchers should consider their positionalities in relation to the study's specific context, where they draw connections between how facets of their experience show up in the work. Boveda and Annamma (2023) critique how positionality statements are often written, offering instead a framework and accompanying series of questions for researchers to consider focused on the onto-epistemic, sociohistorical, and sociocultural dimensions of their positioning (e.g., “How are professional situatedness, power dynamics, and collaborations between researchers and coauthors impacted by multiple oppressions?” 6). These questions, they note, are intended to be engaged throughout the research process from design to publication instead of just while reporting findings to colleagues.

Relationality

Discussions of positionality can be further extended by discussions of relationality. Relationality is a foundational principle across many Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Indigenous research methodologies (Archibald, 2008; Cajete, 2000; Simpson, 2011). Wording here is important. As Shawn Wilson (2008: 7) writes in the book Research is Ceremony, “relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality” (emphasis original). Lauren Tynan importantly notes, “relationality is not a new metaphor to be reaped for academic gain, but a practice bound with responsibilities with kin and Country” (2021: 598). Foundational to relationality, and vice versa, are notions of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility (Brayboy et al., 2012; Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991). These are key tenets of Indigenous research methodologies and research done with Indigenous peoples, and can additionally guide ethical research practices more broadly. Relationality, as well as these other tenets, are always spatially and temporally specific, with particular configurations emerging from the unique contexts of particular research settings.

While relational ethics are central to “excellent” qualitative research (Tracy, 2010); relationality stands in contrast to dominant paradigms of social science research in the United States, where intertwined systems of colonialism and enslavement have relied on the destruction of relationality (Halle-Erby, 2022). It also stands in contrast to academia by and large, which prioritizes neoliberal notions of productivity at expense of the time and work necessary for cultivating authentic and meaningful relationships (Museus and Wang, 2022). In examining how neoliberal logics shape research design, Museus and Wang (2022: 25) further argue, “relationships are not just a tool to execute scholarly inquiry. They are fundamental to the community and collective struggle that neoliberalism seeks to erase.” Slow approaches to scholarship—and support for such approaches at the institutional level—are necessary to build meaningful relationships that counter neoliberal logics pervading academic research (Bergland, 2018; Mason, 2021).

Relationality can be engaged by researchers in many ways. Figueroa (2014) provides a powerful and detailed example of this in the context of an ethnographic study examining questions of citizenship, language, and educational experiences for migrant families. As a participant observer, Figueroa developed intimate and trusting relationships with the Utuado-Alvarez family to the point that the two parents, Marta and Carlos, asked Figueroa to consider taking custody of their children in the case of their detention or deportation. They later went on to ask that Figueroa become an adoptive parent. This happened as Figueroa was preparing to exit the field, and illustrates ethical dilemmas that can emerge in relational approaches to research. In another example, Halle-Erby (2022) utilizes autoethnography to provide an overview of specific relational moves employed during a qualitative study with educational researchers as the participants. Halle-Erby (2022: 15) argues, “describing relationality in methodological terms structures it as a process, a way of conducting research. However, relationality is a way of being in the world with methodological implications.”

Beyond serving as a broader stance (or way of being in the world) that can inform methodology at a higher level, relationality can also inform specific methods in qualitative research. ² Fujii, for instance, describes relational interviewing as an ethical approach to generating data that is grounded in an interpretivist onto-epistemology, enacted through “building working relationships, rather than rapport” (3). Turning to analytic moves, Marin (2020) offers “ambulatory sequences” as a relational unit of analysis grounded in Indigenous epistemologies that helps make visible the geographical dimensions of learning. In another example, Hecht and Nelson (2022) take relational processes between young people and more-than-human beings as a unit of analysis for understanding the formation of environmental identities. By expanding beyond the level of the individual to understand various forms of activity, these methods “operationalize” relationality and extend our understanding of social phenomena as dependent on interactions between individuals and their contexts.

Importantly, across many Indigenous epistemologies, relationality does not just refer to relations between human actors—it includes relations with land and with kin (Cajete, 2000; Meissner, 2022; Tynan, 2021). Ecological, feminist, and eco-feminist scholarship has similarly articulated that all being exist in interconnected webs of relationships (Barad, 2007; Kimmerer, 2010; Simard, 2021). Relationships between people and land are similarly organized on principles of reciprocity, for instance, in the practice of giving and receiving gifts (Kimmerer, 2010; Meissner, 2022), and are not just understood, but felt (Tynan, 2021). Bang and Marin (2015: 532) remind us how the privileging of humans over other actors in the world “divests us of responsibility, humility, and reciprocity,” describing how many Indigenous onto-epistemologies understand more-than-human beings as acting with agency and intentionality. Thus, land plays an active role in constituting relational processes, and becomes something to which we are also responsible in considering how to be in the world relationally.

Place and land

Often missing from discussions of research ethics, positionality, and relationality are issues of place and land. This echoes the treatment of place in social sciences more broadly, where it is not commonly engaged in its full complexity. As Tuck and McKenzie (2014) point out in the book Place in Research, researchers often define their studies by what was learned, how it was learned, and when it was learned, not giving as much attention to where. If anything, researchers often describe the “where” in just a few sentences as part of the research site description when writing up methodology. These tendencies to disregard place in research can be traced to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body, a colonial logic that allows for claims to universal forms of knowledge not tethered to place (Bang, 2017; Grosfoguel, 2013; Tuck and McKenzie, 2014).

While discussions of place may be missing from social science research at a high level, there is still an abundance of literature—particularly in human geography—unpacking the fundamental role of place in shaping human activity. Broadly, places can be defined as concrete locations imbued with meaning, shaped by social, cultural, and political processes (Massey, 1994; Tuan, 1977). Tzou and Bell (2012: 266) write, “place is simultaneously structured by and structures human activity.” A core implication of this view is that all social phenomena occur in places, even if not immediately apparent. Schools, classrooms, and curricula in the United States, for instance, have sought out placelessness as a defining feature in the face of neoliberal educational policies (Gruenewald, 2003). Yet, activities in classrooms are still shaped by the sociocultural context of their material configurations and schooling as an institution. Whether or not a setting explicitly foregrounds attention to nature-culture relations—relations commonly associated with conceptualizations of place—place is still central to human activity and social practice.

Indigenous scholarship often engages land as a concept that is related to place (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014). Land, in this sense, is imperfect shorthand to refer to the lands, waters, humans, plants, animals, rocks, air, and other more-than-human beings whose relations collectively constitute reality. Not just material, land is also constituted by its spiritual, emotional, and intellectual relations (Styres et al., 2013). Bang et al. (2014) offer an Indigenous ontology of land as “land is, therefore we are.” From this perspective, it can be understood that humans only exist in relation to land. This is not to romanticize Indigenous relations to land, as these relations are highly dynamic and context-dependent, and cannot be essentialized into static or stereotypical tropes that create an essentialism in equating Native peoples and nature (Friedel, 2011; Pico, 2017; Yeh and Bryan, 2015).

There are areas of alignment and divergence between the concepts of place and land. They both refer to both physical spaces, as well as their broader sociocultural elements. People shape place and land, and are shaped by place and land. A key departure is that discussions of land more explicitly refuse notions of settler emplacement and replacement—where settlers replace Indigenous peoples (Tuck et al., 2014). Processes of settler emplacement and replacement are central to settler colonialism, a specific form of colonialism in which land is transformed into property that settlers own (Patel, 2014). This relies on the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples. ³ As mentioned earlier, Halle-Erby (2022) points out that settler colonialism both contributes to and relies on the destruction of relationality, as Indigenous peoples’ relations with land pose an obstacle to settler state-building.

Foregrounding relationality takes on new urgency given the social and ecological precarity that threatens the health of lands across the globe (Nxumalo et al., 2022). Threats such as biodiversity loss and climate change continue to accelerate, with their impacts disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. At the root of these problems are sociopolitical systems premised on the domination of nature where land is seen as a resource from which to extract capital—the same logics that undergird colonialism (McKittrick, 2020). In the context of the current era, it is imperative that we work to (re)make more equitable nature-culture relations and live in better relation with land. What role might there be for researchers in this endeavor?

Moving forward: reflections on positionality, relationality, place, and land in research

Drawing from a study with Indigenous teachers and students at a Thai school, Meixi (2022: 16) offers the concept of relational becoming, defined as “an increasing self-awareness of what it means and what it at stake if we do or do not uphold our unique roles, relations, and responsibilities to the living world and to other human people.” Meixi argues that relational becoming ought to be a core pursuit of teaching and learning endeavors. Building on this articulation, I argue that relational becoming ought also be foundational in the process of research.

What would it mean for qualitative researchers, particularly those of us committed to working with and for communities, to expand our conceptualizations of community to include place and land? Taking this further, what possibilities might emerge if we take seriously our relationships and responsibilities to place and land as part of our methodological practice? I offer these questions as a series of friendly provocations for researchers to consider as we reflect on our positionalities and strive to be in good relation with the communities in which we work.

Other scholars have engaged in related projects to examine the role that place plays in processes of qualitative inquiry, particularly with regard to reflexivity and how consideration of place enriches scholarly rigor. This is distinct from the employment of specific methods—such as walking interviews or participatory mapping—that engage issues of place. Anderson et al. (2010), for instance, describe a “polylogic approach” to research in which the researcher, research participants, place of research, and place of method are recognized as interconnected and having agency within the research encounter. Similarly, Swaminathan and Mulvihill (2019) offer place-reflexivity as a methodological approach for researchers to foreground place in their analyses of social phenomena. My argument in this article builds on these previous works in that it calls for centering relations with place and land in research not only because doing so can lend more nuance to inquiry; rather, I argue that doing so is a core tenet of ethical research.

What can it look like to center relations with place and land as a feature of ethical research? Explicitly taking an anticolonial orientation to research, Max Liboiron demonstrates these practices in the book Pollution is Colonialism (2021). Liboiron names that what researchers call “field sites” are always Indigenous homelands, and unpacks the colonial logics through which researchers assume unfettered access to these sites and their stories. Protocols grounded in principles of relationality and good land relations guide the work of Liboiron and collaborators, for instance, as they process fish guts to collect data on plastic pollution. Members of the research team intentionally return fish guts to the water when their part collecting samples is done, rather than disposing of them as biohazards (123–126). Through community peer review processes as part of an anti-colonial and place-based science, Liboiron and collaborators center obligations to land, including fish, fish harvesters, and community members in Newfoundland as part of ethical research practice.

Additional examples can be found in the book Underflows written by Cleo Wölfe Hazard (2022). Drawing upon Indigenous epistemologies—while also making a specific argument against for queer and trans relational methodologies in the sciences—Wölfle Hazard posits how queer field affects and kinship rooted in grief, mourning, and ultimately care for more-than-human ecologies can “(re)animate political movements for biodiversity, climate justice, and water protection” (34). Wölfle Hazard contrasts the technical language used when presenting findings in scientific talks with their intimate relations with water developed through sensory and embodied engagement while collecting data on salmon health. Furthermore, Wölfle Hazard writes how ecologists—like social scientists—“are trained to find field sites that reflect larger phenomena, which are usually abstracted from places made up of culturally situated communities and their more-than-human relations” (148).

When researchers embrace intimate relationships with our field sites and the broader sets of relations that form them, field sites can take on new meanings in researchers’ lives. Rather than being locations that researchers visit solely to collect data to which we otherwise have no personal attachment, our field sites can and should become places marked by ethics of care. As a key element of relationality, care can guide relationships between people and place in which the well-being of all is recognized as deeply intertwined (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). In becoming active participants in these relations, researchers can play a more direct role in supporting social and ecological transformation in which we are answerable to both our human research participants and the lands in which we work.

To help make visible this type of relationality, I offer examples from my own practice. Maintaining a relationship with land is an important dimension of my own positionality as a Palestinian scholar living on Indigenous lands in California. Working in community with other diasporic farmers of color, I grow, save, and share seeds from Palestinian heirloom plants—like jadu’i watermelon, baladi tomatoes, and molokhia—that I initially received either via family or the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. In farming together, we work to improve soil health with agroecological practices such as cover cropping and composting, supporting biocultural diversity in the process. For example, native bees visit the flowers of our heritage plants, helping to sustain each other and illustrating the kinds of meaningful connections that can emerge through practices of relational care. As someone who writes about social and ecological transformation, I see this work as a way to enact the commitments I write about and a way to build transnational solidarities—across people and lands—in rejection of what settler colonialism would otherwise see to, and in support of a bright and lively future. Relatedly, in my empirical research, I have worked to build relationships with the places that make up my study locations just as I have worked to build relationships with the people and organizations with whom I partner. I have come to care deeply about the futures of these places—caring that has been deepened through the process of research—and am compelled by a sense of responsibility toward supporting their well-being. In one line of inquiry, situated in the context of river restoration across watersheds, I intentionally plan for embodied engagement with water as a key methodological practice. Before, during, and after data collection and analysis, I spend time with these rivers. I might shiver from cold water as I swim in creeks and scramble over rocks, or smell the aroma of native plants whose names I work to learn. I do this both on my own—for instance, by going on walks between research interviews—and in community with other people—for instance, by going fishing with research participants and collaborators during periods of downtime. These everyday practices help me build a relationship with place, and are not extraneous to the research process. Rather, they help lend more nuance to both the research process and products, and perhaps more importantly, reinforce my ethical commitments to the health and well-being of the place itself in an effort to be a good visitor.

There are numerous ways in which scholars can become more active participants in relations with land, something that is possible irrespective of whether the research focus itself attends to questions of place. Doing so can vary based on a number of considerations. Sometimes, researchers work in field sites in close proximity to their primary residence where they may already hold existing relationships and have ongoing opportunities to cultivate said relationships. Other times, researchers may only visit more distant field sites on occasion for limited periods of time. In either scenario, there exist opportunities for researchers to intentionally build relationships with land as a core dimension of methodological practice. Just as a researcher might spend time acquainting themselves with the people in a particular community, they can also spend time acquainting themselves with land by getting to know its broader inhabitants, rhythms, and relationships. For instance, they may make time to familiarize themselves with the place through walking, and learn more about its history in what Liboiron (2021) calls doing one's homework. Furthermore, they may identify and take action that supports community organizations doing meaningful local work, even if the organization or work does not have direct ties to the focus of the research study. Over time, researchers can become more active participants in the sets of relations that make up these places. At the center of these practices ought to be a commitment to entering into relationships based on reciprocity, where the study site is more than solely a place to visit and collect data, but one in which the researcher is committed to sustaining both through and beyond their research.

Because land is more than just material, and always shaped by broader sociopolitical processes, getting to know land means that we also get to know Indigenous histories and futures with respect to land. It has become a more common practice in certain spaces to begin events or talks with a land acknowledgment in which the speaker shares the name of the Indigenous lands they are on. While valuable in that they work toward refusing Indigenous erasure, land acknowledgments on their own are insufficient when it comes to being in relation with Indigenous peoples (Stewart-Ambo and Yang, 2021). More meaningful next steps entail supporting Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship efforts. This might involve forming partnerships with Indigenous peoples, particularly partnerships where Indigenous peoples are in the lead when non-Indigenous scholars are involved. Focusing specifically on collaborative initiatives oriented toward environmental problem-solving, Reo et al. (2017) offer several principles that support and sustain engagement of Indigenous peoples in multi-actor partnerships including: respect for Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous control of knowledge mobilization, intergenerational involvement, Indigenous self-determination, continuous cross-cultural education, and early involvement of Indigenous peoples.

Researchers can also consider how relations with land might be written up. This could entail more rich description as to the complex sets of relations that make up our field sites, in contrast to the typical brevity that characterizes descriptions of the “research context” in most empirical studies. More vivid depictions of the places in which the research took place can further contextualize the researchers’ claims and help situate the findings in their specific contexts. Researchers could also bring descriptions of their relationships with the field site into the writing of any positionality statement. What relationship did the researcher have with land before the beginning of the study? If at all, how did the researcher work to build relations with land throughout the course of the study, and how did this mediate the research? Stewart-Ambo and Yang (2021) argue that being a good visitor means being in good relation to land, relations that I argue ought to be considered in considering one's positionality. They offer the idea of land as pedagogy, which means learning from, with, and on the land from Indigenous knowledge holders, with Indigenous pedagogies, and through Indigenous methodologies as a way to enact being a good visitor.

Conclusion

Building with Indigenous epistemologies, I have argued for the need to center relationality with respect to place and land in conceptualizing researcher positionality. This means working intentionally to build relationships of reciprocity and care with the places in which we live and work, and particularly our field sites. While I focus primarily on qualitative and community-engaged scholarship that is often place-based in nature, many of these arguments are transferable to other forms of research, where researchers can and should consider positionality with respect to land, and work to foreground relationality in their scholarship. Too often, researchers approach their field sites solely as places from which to extract data. When researchers do consider their positionality and work to enter into reciprocal and respectful relations in communities, their efforts often focus narrowly with regards to human actors. Indigenous onto-epistemologies push us to broaden our notions of community to consist of both human and more-than-human actors with complex sets of relations. Becoming active participants in these relations can catalyze forms of research that work against settler colonialism and are accountable to the health and revitalization of land, a necessary project in this unique moment in history that is ripe for social and ecological transformation.