Activating the Heart: Storytelling, Knowledge Sharing and Relationship (Christensen, Julia, Christopher Cox and Lisa Szabo-Jones, eds.) (original) (raw)
This new collection of essays takes up issues relevant to the conduct of research involving Indigenous communities. The title phrase-Activating the Heart-summarizes a central message. The volume encourages researchers to move their inquiries beyond any posture of professedly disengaged, academic objectivity as they carry out their work. It urges them instead toward fully human encounters in which they and their Indigenous participants endeavor to reveal themselves to each other and forge meaningful bonds. Throughout, contributors focus on storytelling, in its many forms, as both research method and methodology. They argue and illustrate how that activity and the values that ground it can become vehicles by which both researchers and communities explore meanings that inform their lived experience, make such experience available to each other, and generate new meanings and opportunities. Editors Julia Christensen, Christopher Cox and Lisa Szabo-Jones observe that the volume aspires to influence not only research inquiry but also academic training: to "make room for a different kind of education, one that builds necessary ties between community and academia to engender a space for broader, non-oppressive education models" (xi). Toward these ends, chapters "examine storytelling as a mode of understanding, sharing, and creating knowledge" (xii). Separate sections of the volume take up each of these three intellectual tasks. The section on "Storytelling to Understand" begins with the essay "Finding My Way: Emotions and Ethics in Community-Based Action Research with Indigenous Communities." Here, Leonie Sandercock-self-described "immigrant Australian-working class white girl PhD-ed and socialized into Anglo-American academia" (7)-discusses her experiences collaborating with a First-Nations community in British Columbia via an "action research" project.
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