About this Research Topic

Background

Research involving Indigenous peoples and places requires cultural competence and safety. All researchers in this space have the specific responsibility to ensure their research and its outcomes have meaningful benefit to the peoples involved and honor Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and worldviews, recognizing that these have often been marginalized and suppressed in academic spaces.

Indigenous Research Methodologies (IRM) are systematic approaches to research grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing, and are underpinned by culturally contextualized ontologies, epistemologies, and value systems developed over millennia. While varied, they emphasize interconnectedness and relationality, holistic and adaptive approaches to the research process, and respect for Indigenous peoples, knowledges, cultures, languages, histories, and environments. In academia, IRM offer unique ways of generating knowledge, understanding, and innovating in an increasingly complex world. They provide valuable opportunities for reconciliation, social justice, and self-determination for Indigenous peoples, and can also serve to challenge existing epistemological biases and imbalances in knowledge generation and dissemination, advance more inclusive and equitable academic practices, and enhance knowledge diversity.

Informed and appropriate use of IRM can safeguard and empower both researchers and communities through more ethical, inclusive, and respectful qualitative and quantitative research practices. IRM are of increasing interest to Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers in higher education institutions amid hard-fought efforts to decolonize and (re)indigenize higher education. However, while IRM are embedded in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and value systems, the processes, protocols, funding structures, ethical procedures, and norms of research in the English-speaking academic world still predominantly embody Western research traditions, worldviews, and value systems, therefore giving rise to 'research at the interface' (Durie, 2004).

In this Research Topic we define interfaces as the complex spaces wherein Indigenous and non-Indigenous research methodologies, approaches, protocols, methods, research traditions, and institutional structures meet and interact both in principle and in practice. Since research is not culture-free, interfaces can be places of synergy and innovation and also contested sites of challenge and perpetuated epistemological violence. Considered and reflective practice is therefore critical to research quality and safety.

The goal of this Research Topic is to promote critical reflexivity by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers at the interface where diverse knowledge systems and research traditions meet. It is a forum for respectfully sharing reflections, challenges, opportunities, insights, and learnings to strengthen the enactment of IRM and research at the interface.

Themes include, but are not limited to, the following:

• experienced similarities and differences between Western-centric and Indigenous research methodologies and methods
• reflections on the epistemologies, ontologies, cosmologies, or axiologies underlying different approaches in Indigenous research spaces and interfaces
• decolonization and indigenization of research and research methods in Indigenous research spaces.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Data Report
• Editorial
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Indigenous Research Methods, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, research paradigms, decolonising research methods, knowledge diversity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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