Research and/as Relation: Documenting Experiences of Community-Collaborative Researchers in HCI

Community-collaborative approaches (CCA) have been proposed as more equitable ways to engage communities in research, as they urge researchers to commit to long-term relationships with community members than with other participatory methods. However, the normative structures of HCI and computing research can present challenges in pursuing CCA for the researchers and community partners involved. This paper offers insights into: i) how research and relation impact each other, and ii) how we can conceptualize research as a mode of relation. We present our findings from eighteen semi-structured interviews with community-collaborative researchers in computing and HCI. We then ground our paper in theories of relation and relationality from Caribbean thought, Black studies, and Indigenous scholarship to apply a conceptual framework of relation to our findings. Through this work, we aim to interrogate what it means to center relationality in CCA, beyond and within the development of scientific research.