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Social Sciences Guide to Research

McMaster Indigenous Research Institute (MIRI)

McMaster Indigenous Research Primer

The McMaster Indigenous Research Primer: What is Indigenous Research? The purpose of the Indigenous Research Primer is to guide those at McMaster University who are engaging with Indigenous Peoples and communities in their research. The Primer seeks to inform Indigenous and non-Indigenous, early and experienced researchers at any stage of their career and/or education.

The McMaster Indigenous Research Primer was launched on September 13, 2023.

Indigenous Research Methodologies

Applying Indigenous Research Methods

Applying Indigenous Research Methods focuses on the question of "How" Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRMs) can be used and taught across Indigenous studies and education. In this collection, Indigenous scholars address the importance of IRMs in their own scholarship, while focusing conversations on the application with others. Each chapter is co-authored to model methods rooted in the sharing of stories to strengthen relationships, such as yarning, storywork, and others. The chapters offer a wealth of specific examples, as told by researchers about their research methods in conversation with other scholars, teachers, and community members. Applying Indigenous Research Methods is an interdisciplinary showcase of the ways IRMs can enhance scholarship in fields including education, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, social work, qualitative methodologies, and beyond.

Decolonizing Data

Canada's colonial history continues to have a devastating impact on Indigenous peoples and communities. Decolonizing Data explores how ongoing structures of colonialization negatively impact the well-being of Indigenous peoples and communities across Canada, resulting in persistent health inequalities. In addressing the social dimensions of health, particularly as they affect Indigenous peoples and BIPOC communities, Decolonizing Data asks, should these groups be given priority for future health policy considerations? Decolonizing Data provides a deeper understanding of the social dimensions of health as applied to Indigenous peoples, who have been historically underfunded in and excluded from health services, programs, and quality of care; this has most recently been seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on both Western and Indigenous methodologies, this unique scholarly contribution takes a sociological perspective, as well as the "two-eyed seeing" approach to research methods. By looking at the ways that everyday research practices contribute to the colonization of health outcomes for Indigenous peoples, Decolonizing Data exposes the social dimensions of healthcare, and offers a careful and respectful reflection on how to "unsettle conversations" about applied social research initiatives for our most vulnerable groups.

Decolonizing Research

From Oceania to North America, indigenous peoples have created storytelling traditions of incredible depth and diversity. The term 'indigenous storywork' has come to encompass the sheer breadth of ways in which indigenous storytelling serves as a historical record, as a form of teaching and learning, and as an expression of indigenous culture and identity. But such traditions have too often been relegated to the realm of myth and legend, recorded as fragmented distortions, or erased altogether. Decolonizing Research brings together indigenous researchers and activists from Canada, Australia and New Zealand to assert the unique value of indigenous storywork as a focus of research, and to develop methodologies that rectify the colonial attitudes inherent in much past and current scholarship. By bringing together their own indigenous perspectives, and by treating indigenous storywork on its own terms, the contributors illuminate valuable new avenues for research, and show how such reworked scholarship can contribute to the movement for indigenous rights and self-determination.

Indigenous Methodologies

An innovative and important contribution to Indigenous research approaches, this revised second edition provides a framework for conducting Indigenous methodologies, serving as an entry point to learn more broadly about Indigenous research

Indigenous Research

Scholars understand what Indigenous research is, but how we practice Indigenous research ethically and respectfully in Canada is under exploration. This ground-breaking edited collection provides readers with concrete and in-depth examples of how to overcome the challenges of Indigenous research with respect to Indigenous worldviews, epistemologies, and ontology. In collaboration with their communities, and with guidance from Elders and other traditional knowledge keepers, each contributor links their personal narrative of Indigenous research to current discussions and debates. Accessible in nature, this interdisciplinary research tool is an essential read for all students and scholars in Indigenous Studies, as well as in the education, anthropology, sociology, and history research methodology classroom.

Kaandossiwin, 2nd Ed

Indigenous methodologies have been silenced and obscured by the Western scientific means of knowledge production. In a challenge to this colonialist rejection of Indigenous knowledge, Anishinaabe re-searcher Kathleen Absolon describes how Indigenous re-searchers re-theorize and re-create methodologies. Indigenous knowledge resurgence is being informed by taking a second look at how re-search is grounded. Absolon consciously adds an emphasis on re with a hyphen as a process of recovery of Kaandossiwin and Indigenous re-search. Understanding Indigenous methodologies as guided by Indigenous paradigms, worldviews, principles, processes and contexts, Absolon argues that they are wholistic, relational, inter-relational and interdependent with Indigenous philosophies, beliefs and ways of life. In exploring the ways Indigenous re-searchers use Indigenous methodologies within mainstream academia, Kaandossiwin renders these methods visible and helps to guard other ways of knowing from colonial repression. This second edition features the author's reflections on her decade of re-search and teaching experience since the last edition, celebrating the most common student questions, concerns, and revelations.

Research and Reconciliation

In this edited collection, leading scholars seek to disrupt Eurocentric research methods by introducing students, professors, administrators, and practitioners to frameworks of Indigenous research methods through a lens of reconciliation. The foundation of this collection is rooted in each contributor's unique conception of reconciliation, which extends beyond the parameters of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission to include a broader, more global approach to reconciliation. More pointedly, contributors discuss how effective research is when it's demonstrated through acts of reconciliation. Encouraging active, participatory approaches to research, this seminal text includes a range of examples, including a variety of creative forms, such as storytelling, conversations, letters, social media, and visual methodologies that challenge linear ways of thinking and embrace Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing. This collection is a go-to resource for all disciplines with a research-focus, including Indigenous studies, sociology, social work, education, gender studies, and anthropology. Features: A focus on Indigenous methods of knowledge transmission that are not traditionally embraced in academia and challenges the Eurocentric concept of research Explores research methodologies through the lens of reconciliation on a global scale A unique text that utilizes reflections of individual contributors, emphasizing the narrative of each chapter relevant to Indigenous traditions of storytelling

Research As Resistance

This second edition of Research as Resistance builds upon the resistance-based methods featured in the first edition and contributes to the recent resurgence of marginalized knowledges in social science research, drawing from Indigenous, feminist, and critical race scholarship. Bringing together the theory and practice of anti-oppressive research, this text emphasizes the importance of critical reflexivity and participatory methods. The contributors to this volume, including both emerging and established scholars, write from marginalized perspectives, explore a variety of methodologies, and address current theoretical issues in social justice research, discussing ontological and epistemological considerations within the field. This substantially revised and updated edition features new chapters that address narrative research, Foucauldian methods, community action research, queer theory, and insurgent Indigenous research. The text provides a solid foundation in specific methodologies while also highlighting their emancipatory potential. With a unique emphasis on both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of socially just research, this collection is an invaluable resource for senior undergraduate and graduate courses on anti-oppressive practice and research theory and methods in the social sciences.

Research Is Ceremony

Indigenous researchers are knowledge seekers who work to progress Indigenous ways of being, knowing and doing in a modern and constantly evolving context. This book describes a research paradigm shared by Indigenous scholars in Canada and Australia, and demonstrates how this paradigm can be put into practice. Relationships don't just shape Indigenous reality, they are our reality. Indigenous researchers develop relationships with ideas in order to achieve enlightenment in the ceremony that is Indigenous research. Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to these relationships. For researchers to be accountable to all our relations, we must make careful choices in our selection of topics, methods of data collection, forms of analysis and finally in the way we present information. I'm an Opaskwayak Cree from northern Manitoba currently living in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales, Australia. I'm also a father of three boys, a researcher, son, uncle, teacher, world traveller, knowledge keeper and knowledge seeker. As an educated Indian, I've spent much of my life straddling the Indigenous and academic worlds. Most of my time these days is spent teaching other Indigenous knowledge seekers (and my kids) how to accomplish this balancing act while still keeping both feet on the ground.

Indigenous Resource in the Open Library

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