Strangers at the Gate

This paper is about the work we do to create productive partnerships in community settings: developing relationships, demonstrating commitments, and overcoming personal and institutional barriers to community-based design research. Through an ethnographic account of the elements of community-based research normally elided from reports of design process, we explore how the impact of institutional histories and personal relationships went beyond simply identifying potential partners, but fundamentally guided the research questions and approach. We examine the different roles researchers play - researcher, confidant, advocate, interloper, invader, and collaborator - and how those roles create particular relations in the field. The contribution of this work is the development of a reflective account of the research in order to evaluate knowledge production, rigor, and advance methods for engaging in community-based research.