Deep listening, slow relationships, world-making: Indigenous and feminist ecological reflections on the Listening Guide and the Live Methods Manifesto

Rooted in a three-year (2018–2021) research collaboration between Indigenous and white settler researchers in Canada, this article asks: how do we use, adapt and remake methods developed in Euro-western contexts for very different geopolitical contexts, specifically Indigenous ones? How do we do this without minimizing the harms caused by Euro-western methods and epistemologies (some of which are ongoing) while providing ample space for Indigenous histories and approaches to knowledge-making and world-making? We detail how we used and adapted a feminist, relational, narrative data analysis approach – the Listening Guide – in two research projects, reflecting on how and why we made modifications. We expand three key points from the 2012 Live Methods Manifesto, while advancing two arguments about methods in this paper. First, we maintain that as all methods have histories and exist within geopolitical, socio-cultural, philosophical, ethical, epistemological and ontological contexts, they are neither static objects nor recipes that can be uniformly applied. We argue that the Listening Guide, often referred to as a singular approach, is in fact multiple. Second, we assert the ecological liveliness of methods in practice and in their specific contexts – their flow and flux, processes of becoming, relationalities and refusals, disturbances and renewals. This means that the Live Methods Manifesto must also be a living and constantly remade guide that is attentive to diverse research relationships, responsiveness, reflexivity and responsibilities through all phases of research, including pre- and post-research reflections.