Revisiting Insider Practices: Ethical Considerations, Practices, and Hopes for Doing Community Work and Narrative Research in and about Our Own Communities

In this paper, we describe the hopes, considerations, and questions of a narrative practice research collaboration among three closely connected transgender (trans) and/or non-binary collaborators, in a collection of work meant to support trans, non-binary, and gender expansive life and in response to trans death at a time of increasing hostility toward trans communities. We apply a specific focus on inquiring into how to do narrative therapy and community work research in and about our own communities, and what the ethical, relational and methodological practices for this work might be. We do this through reflecting on existing literature related to insider research in the field of narrative therapy and community work and in qualitative research more broadly, reflecting on our own practices of collaboration, and imagining possibilities for ourselves and other researchers working with and within their own communities. We describe our insider-outsider-insider positioning, how we understand this to be shaping our work, and share our ongoing curiosities about how to move through this work together.