Changing our minds, changing our bodies: Power as embodied in research relations

In this paper I offer a reflection on my role in a collaborative research experience as a way of illustrating how attempts to establish rapport and work collaboratively in teaching and research can result in struggles over authority, power, and goals. In particular, I argue that we need to look closely at how embodied relations shape and are shaped in collaborative research relations. When discussing power relations among university researchers and classroom teachers - or in any relationship in which we are "studying down" (Harding, 1987) - researchers tend to focus on affiliatory or institutional power positions. I use artifactual data from a research relationship to raise questions about the other processes of power at work in such relationships. Specifically, I ask what our discursive and embodied relations with one another meant in terms of power. How did we enact power in and through the ways we positioned our bodies or the bodies of others? How are these material, embodied experiences situated in and productive of larger social, cultural, and historical discourses? Finally, what implications do these discursive and embodied relations have for all types of collaborative and even non-collaborative research relations?