‘Can we hug?’

Enacting Situated Solidarity for Research as a Transformative Practice

Abstract

Adopting a stance of ‘situated solidarity’ is one way feminist researchers have sought to redress the colonial legacies that continue to shape research practices, particularly those involving researchers from the global ‘North’ working in the global ‘South’. In this paper, I argue that while this stance has helped reduce research harms, its transformative potential can be expanded through research practices that foreground co-creation and embodiment. I develop this argument through discussing key moments from a Moroccan-Swiss performative and collective research on peasant agroecology. Drawing on (auto)ethnographic material from this research, I reflect on our efforts, successful and not, to navigate power asymmetries, constitute a learning community and engage in processes of being–doing–knowing that enabled relational and embodied forms of knowledge co-production. I highlight the transformations in subjectivities, imaginaries, and understandings that emerged through this research and suggest that, however modest, such transformations are among the ways research can contribute to world-making.