Dates: June 4-5 (Friday & Saturday)
*Memorial Day is May 31st

Location: University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, U.S.A.

This interdisciplinary conference addresses the question: What are the epistemological and ethical considerations in research with immigrant populations? The purpose of this conference is to engage university and community colleagues and students from a variety of disciplines and interests in consideration of this and other questions about ethics and epistemology in their research practices.

We invite presenters and participants to engage in reflection and discussion that focuses attention on the possibilities and problematics of research with immigrant youth, adults and community members. The conference participants will include individuals from diverse methodological and disciplinary areas, such as education, social work, anthropology, urban studies, the humanities, and the health professions. The conference will emphasize the implications of practices in research design, data collection, analysis and writing of research that involves immigrant populations. These conversations will include concerns related to Institutional Review Boards as well as those that move beyond IRB, including presentation and dissemination of findings, sharing of research design, advocacy issues, etc.

We invite proposals that address researchers’ dilemmas as they move into, through, and beyond their work with immigrant communities. We offer the following questions to stimulate ideas for proposals.

Into

• Are there unique ethical concerns involved when doing research with immigrant communities, as opposed to doing research with any other group?
• How do we gain access to communities in ways that are ethical?
• How do we gather the stories and memories of immigrant communities?  Who initiates collection, and for what purpose?
• How does being an insider and/or an outsider impact access to immigrant communities?
• What aspects of the research questions, design or protocol should or could benefit from initial and ongoing community input?

Through

• What is the nature of (long-term) reciprocal engagement?
• How is the experience of conducting research with a community organization that has its own agenda and research questions different from conducting research with individuals who do not necessarily have a shared goal? How does the research design differ in each of these scenarios?
• Do different research methodologies involve different ethical considerations?

Gathering

• To what extent and in what ways is the researcher responsible or entailed to the community?
• How does diversity and political difference within the immigrant “community” interact with the research process?
• How does resource allocation for research determine whose stories get told and by whom?
• Are there special problems in doing research with, or collecting non-print expressions of experience?
• Is there room for research that does not involve extensive community engagement? When might this be appropriate?
• How do we reconcile the need for extensive community engagement and the need to adhere to academic timelines?
• How do we represent our participants’ actions and words in our transcriptions?

Interpreting

• What are our experiences with communities who seek long-term relationships with researchers, as well as those who want to analyze/use the data on their own? Who owns the data/stories?
• How are the memories of immigrant communities housed and presented?
• What innovative strategies are researchers using to represent community members dialogically through writing?
• How do researchers approach issues of voice, register, representation, etc.?
• How do researchers capture the complexities of immigrant communities without essentializing (i.e. romanticizing or vilifying) these communities?

Beyond

Communicating

• How can we write in different ways so as to reach different audiences?
• Can traditional print or new media forms capture experiences not currently archived, and what kind of commitments are needed to preserve such materials?
• How do different people use archival collections for different purposes?

Advocating for Communities

• How can we benefit from and contribute to the needs of the community through our publications?
• How will findings be used in the community and does the research have transformative power?
• What advocacy issues, dilemmas, challenges, etc. have we encountered as researchers?
• How can we use our research to influence policy?
• Who does our research benefit?

The interdisciplinary focus of this conference has the potential to foster relationships across disciplinary boundaries within universities as well as national and international communities. We hope this conference will provide researchers and community members with an increased consciousness of the ways in which, research is imbued with issues of power and ethics. It will advance the way we will approach our research practices and the preparation of future researchers to work responsibly with immigrant populations.

To sustain and extend the work and conversations of this conference, we will select a small number of conference presentations for revision and publication in a peer-reviewed edited book.