Power and Positionality in RPPs

Defined

The University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Initiatives shares two useful definitions of positionality and how it relates to power. Generally, positionality “refers to how differences in social position and power shape identities and access in society.” In a research context, positionality can be described as a methodology that “requires researchers to identify their own degrees of privilege through factors of race, class, educational attainment, income, ability, gender, and citizenship”, as described by M. Duarte (2017, p.135).

In the context of an RPP, power and positionality show up in many ways: Power differences resulting from individual identities, including race, gender, educational attainment, sexuality, age, nationality, and the intersectionalities of these; those resulting from organizational hierarchies that position people differently across roles; those resulting from funding practices, where research-side organizations are commonly still the ones who receive grant funding; those resulting from histories of oppression of marginalized or non-dominant populations that have often been the subject of research – just to name a few.

For many RPPs, their design of bringing together representatives of the education practice and research communities to engage in collaborative work explicitly seeks to challenge these imbalances of power, particularly those that have characterized the production of research knowledge. The updated definition of RPPs put forth in the 2021 “Research-Practice Partnerships in Education: The State of the Field” white paper also reflects this aim, defining RPPs as: “A long-term collaboration aimed at educational improvement or equitable transformation through engagement with research. These partnerships are intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work”.

Yet, RPP processes are still prone to the same unintended biases shaping other well-intentioned endeavors, and many of the organizations participating in RPP work are shaped by the same histories of oppression and institutional racism that have produced and continue to produce inequities in education. Additionally, “the set of skills, expertise, and time required to make RPPs successfully cross lines of color and power are not part of most researchers’ training, leaving them ill equipped to avoid perpetuating existing systems of injustice” (Denner, Bean, Campe, Martinez, and Torres, 2019). Those engaged in RPP work must therefore actively and constantly interrogate the role of power and positionality in their work and home organizations.