Whose field? Decolonizing social science research Praxis

This paper discusses the impact of colonial legacies in field research and the implications for decolonizing research. The authors analyze how research processes and practices (re) produce particular conceptions of communities as ‘fields’, rendering them simultaneously familiar and alienating to indigenous/insider researchers. Drawing on the authors’ experiences as insider researchers working within their own communities, it illustrates how conventional fieldwork overlooks nuanced relational power dynamics and continues to reproduce colonial misrepresentations and extractive logics that position communities as objects of study rather than co-producers of knowledge. Using fieldwork vignettes as a reflexive mechanism, the authors suggest ways researchers may disentangle themselves from orthodox frames of knowledge production to contribute to epistemic accountability for the communities they research. The authors advocate for research practices that foreground honest disclosure, collaborative knowledge production, respect for local ontologies, and ultimately, the generation of locally relatable knowledges that preserve the integrity of Indigenous social structures.