The Lombok process: Challenging power in a transnational comparative research project

SynopsisThis paper describes a transnational collaborative life story research project on women's experience of their reproductive lives. The research teams came from Indonesia, Canada and Pakistan. Each team collected and analysed its own data, but also worked collaboratively with the other teams on the collective data. In this paper I explore the political objective of developing genuine collaboration and reflexive solidarity between northern and southern researchers, and the theoretical challenges arising from that project. This paper focuses on how southern partners analysed northern data and interrogated northern researchers' analysis of their own data — a process that helped us to re-examine both our methods and our findings as we worked to de-colonise both knowledge and relationships in the research process.