Community Voices the Need to Write, Record, and Disseminate Research Findings From the Grassroots

Abstract

Research on Indigenous people has moved from looking in on a subject to having the subjects as research partners, alongside academic researchers. Community-based research has a number of ethical requirements that means research partners have a voice. How this voice is captured, stored, and distributed is of great importance. For many publishers, academic or institutional, the voice of the layman or grassroots organisations are not valued. This results in much work going unpublished and hence being poorly archived. Often the stories of community are told with an earthy richness that is lacking in academic writing. This is partly due cultural storytelling, not writing to the rigidity of academia. This chapter will discuss a variety of methods that can be employed to raise the voice of community research partners who may not be academics and academically minded. However, the stories of our partners are important and are just as valid as those of the academic researcher.