Brokers, Collaborators and Knowledge Translators: Expanding the Role of Research Assistants in Geographic Research

ABSTRACT While ‘local’ research assistants (RA) often play a key role in knowledge production in fieldwork‐based disciplines like geography, their role and agency often remain silenced. This paper brings together scholarship in feminist geography and critical development studies to reposition RAs as brokers, collaborators, and knowledge translators. I mobilise Nagar's concept of hungry translations, which reimagines translation as a dynamic and negotiated political practice that underpins collaborative research. I reflect on collaborating with Mueda, a Karen environmental activist from near the fieldsites in the Salween River Basin. We conducted fieldwork with Karen communities contesting a proposed water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. Mueda forged networks and translated diverse knowledges for academic, civil society and community audiences, including during the project's contested Environmental Impact Assessment. This was undertaken as part of ‘my’ PhD research and a long‐standing civil society movement challenging unjust development in the Basin. Collaboration with Mueda enabled Salween residents and civil society actors to shape the research design, questions, outcomes and outputs. This paper illustrates how collaboration between foreign researchers and local RAs can enable research to align with and advance local goals and objectives. This is important amidst growing calls to decolonise research methodologies and enhance researcher accountability to communities and collaborators.