Nothing about us without us : exploring issues of researching the O/other

How do we understand the experiences of people where the researcher is 'outside' these social groups? How do we undertake research in ways that does not further colonise or disempower these people?<br /><br />This seminar aims to explore issues and approaches to research in contexts where the researcher is 'outside' the social/cultural group of the participants. If research is understood as an act of knowledge production, then both the positioning of the researcher and the act of research are inevitably political, where the power over the representation and categorisation of marginalised peoples and their social experiences is with others not of these groups, (usually aligned with dominant epistemologies). The net result of this kind of research and social activity is the catch cry from marginalised groups, summed up by that now in use in the disability field: 'nothing about us without us'. This paper focuses on the central importance of the meaning making process and offers a method for building meanings and understandings that explicitly draw on the located contexts of their production. The paper offers a set of 'ethics of meaning making' that support appropriate work in these contexts, and focuses on articulating one step of the method that supports these.<br />