The invisible hands that stay: Recognition of the relational labour of research assistants and community researchers

Literature has shown how the assistants, brokers and facilitating researchers whose labour sustains field research routinely go uncredited, but this scholarship has mostly examined research conducted by Global North institutions in the Global South. Less is known about how the same extraction operates inside southern African knowledge economies, among regional universities, non-governmental organisations and funded projects. This article centres the first-hand accounts of four South African-based authors: a research practitioner in the Limpopo borderlands, a director of an Indigenous research council, a community liaison advocate and a university-based researcher who herself worked for years as an unpublished research assistant. Using a collaborative and reflexive approach, we draw on our diverse experiences of research practice, community engagement, Indigenous research governance and academia to critically examine the often-unrecognised labour that sustains research. Reading these reflections through a lens of ubuntu, decolonial scholarship and the San Code of Research Ethics – the first research ethics code developed by an Indigenous African community – we argue that what is extracted and left unrecognised in research assistance is not only intellectual labour, but relational and emotional labour, and a standing accountability to communities and colleagues that outlasts any funded project. The four-criterion definition of authorship, honest as written, can also produce this erasure once set against the structure of grant-funded research. Recognition, fair pay, co-authorship and reform of funding, ethics review and publishing practice are not gestures of goodwill. They are what an ubuntu-grounded research ethic requires.