‘Equity based design thinking advocates that those at the margins should hold the most power in the design process. Ceding power doesn’t necessarily exclude anyone who isn’t directly impacted by the problem but calls for aid to radically rethink ‘expert’ roles, recognise the ‘process as product,’ ceding power where necessary, and listening.’ (Oddy, 2021).

Thinking about inclusion in research methodology involves first identifying the ecology (Flinders, 1992) of all those involved or affected by the research project. This is needed from the outset to understand who might be centrally involved in the project, as well as those directly and indirectly affected by it, considering both during and following the project itself. 

Figure 1 An ecological representation of the web of potential relationships in educational research with the forcibly displaced.

In doing so, differences in power and agency should be recognised to identify existing and potential vulnerabilities and marginalisation. While some of this might be explicit, a researcher/research team needs a critical and open-minded approach to appreciate structural injustices hidden within accepted norms. Language is a critical issue to consider in terms of its opportunities to communicate but also to exclude and reinforce barriers. Finding ways to provide opportunities for all those to speak in their preferred voice, with confidence, is in an important tool in knowledge construction through collaboration.

This understanding needs to extend to an appreciation of the values, hopes, expectations, ways of being, knowing and coming to know of those who are to be invited to engage with a project. This goes beyond gaining official permissions from gatekeepers and informed consent/assent from future participants to recast those in the setting as the hosts for the research. Instead of a researcher inviting those in a setting to a research project, the tables should be turned and it be accepted that is the researcher who needs to be invited under their own terms. The San people of southern Africa have demanded this and created their own code of research (South African San Institute, 2017). Similarly, there are Indigenous bodies in Australasia and Canada who seek to advise those requesting to research Indigenous communities. 

In the following video, Alison Buckler and Alison Fox explore what it means to think about equitable research in settings, how research grows out of investing in relationships, acknowledging the roles and consents of everyone involved in research in dissemination and offering advice about the value of working iteratively with the human research ethics committee to support equity-based design and conduct. Alison Buckler illustrates her responses through examples from her experiences within the Ibali project, which has evolved into an international knowledge network, and the CHILD project in Zimbabwe (Power et al., 2021). At one point in the video Alison points colleagues to the work of Bukola Oyinloye (Oyinloye, 2021) about working with ethical frameworks from both our home and the visited settings.

Transcript (70.8 KB) .

This stance appreciates the pre-existence of culture, community, belonging and becoming in that setting and, as Jessica Oddy acknowledges, for us ‘to radically rethink ‘expert’ roles’ (Oddy, 2021). This does not exclusively apply to outsider researchers but also to those who might consider themselves already known or with pre-existing links to a research setting. This has been illustrated by Hanna Nikkanen (2019) reflecting on feeling like a ‘double agent’ when working as a teacher-researcher working part-time in both a school and a Higher Education Institution. She needed to work out how to become an ‘active agent’ for positive change in both settings, rather than as an intruder in one and imposter in the other. 

Getting to know a setting can be achieved in many ways including starting with desk-based research, advice from other researchers and community members, even before entering the research site. This requires a commitment by the research team to ‘recognise the ‘process as product’, ceding power where necessary and listening’ (Oddy, 2021). As well as affecting the choice of topic such equity-based design affects the ways roles and relationships are formed and established. Participatory and co-design approaches which form democratic research teams need coaching and buddying to come to understand one another (Benz et al., 2024). The 14 roles outlined in the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) (NISO, 2025) could be useful to establish at an early stage, and a commitment made to value and recognise each of these contributions. The outcomes of such collaboration will inevitably affect the way the research team reach decisions about ways of working in the project, including gaining ethical approval for the research, what is considered valuable data and how this data should be gathered. More specifically, to avoid imposing one set of values and expectations of researcher behaviours on another cultural setting, known as ‘ethics dumping’ (Schroeder et al., 2018), in conducting research in resource-poor settings, agreement should be reached about the shared values which unite the research team and participants within communities (Agbaire, 2023). Useful collaborative work has been achieved across organisations representing different cultural settings to present the 24 articles of ‘The TRUST Code: A Global Code of Conduct for Equitable Research Partnerships’ (TRUST, 2018) built on the pillars of fairness, respect, care and honesty.

The ways of working might need to disrupt assumptions and expectations, for example of needing paper evidence of signed consent, in settings where this might raise cultural or political concerns, or be considered disrespectful, and where oral methods of gaining consent might be more appropriate, (University of Oxford, 2021), and confidentiality, such as when interviews might be expected to be observed by a community or family and managing expectations will be needed (Ebubedike et al., 2023). The effect of such observation in situations of power imbalance or in the composition of focus groups, within which groups normally separated in general society are contrived to communicate in a shared space, needs to be considered to enable contributions to be made in a fair and supported way. For the courage to express what needs to be heard for change, not only ‘safe’ but ‘brave spaces’ (Cook-Sather, 2019) need to be created. With such support research can be transformational for those involved. This requires research ethics committees to reconsider vulnerability and risk to be educated on what facilitates empowerment towards maximising the positive outcomes of research (Stevenson et al., 2022) and take on a dialogic approach to ethical approval (Fox and Busher, 2022). 

This transformation and disruption lays responsibilities on the researcher/research team to remain committed once data has been gathered. To avoid being accused of ‘helicopter research’ (Adame, 2021) in which researchers go into a setting, conduct their research, extracting data and bringing it back to their own context, the commitment to empowerment and as the demonstration of relationship building and trust, involvement in the processes of data analysis, dissemination and legacy require plans for exiting the research to be built in on entering. This brings a researcher back to thinking about the ecology of the research project and who has been included, affected by or excluded. Who stepped forward to meet with the researcher/research team and who's voice remained silent? For example, Victoria Jack (2006), in her research in refugee camps, needed to look past the gatekeeper recommended camp committees who represented only dominant communities and find ways to hear the very different experiences of those in the same camps in order to make recommendations that would benefit all.

Takeaways:

• recognise the ecology of your research project to identify all involved or affected 
• embrace the diversity of perspectives taking this approach brings 
• avoid helicopter research by building knowledge together for capacity building and sustainability
• avoid ‘dumping’ your ethical principles and values onto ways of researching by negotiating shared ways of engagement
• enable communication in preferred languages for inclusive engagement.