“I Don't Think that Any Peer Review Committee . . . Would Ever ‘Get’ What I Currently Do”: How Institutional Metrics for Success and Merit Risk Perpetuating the (Re)production of Colonial Relationships in Community-Based Participatory Research Involving Indigenous Peoples in Canada

Abstract

This article reports on findings from a study that explored how a group of leading health researchers who do Indigenous community-engaged research (n = 20) in Canada envision enacting ethically sound research with Indigenous communities, as well as the concomitant tensions associated with doing so. In particular, we explore how institutional metrics for assessing merit and granting tenure are seen to privilege conventional discourses of productivity and validity in research and, as a result, are largely incongruent with the relational values associated with decolonizing research through community-based participatory health research. Our findings reveal that colonial incursion from the academy risk filtering into such research agendas and create a conflict between relational accountability to community partners and academic accountability to one’s discipline and peers.

Keywords

• Indigenous health
• ethics
• decolonizing methodologies
• community-based participatory research
• Canada
• tenure and promotion