Honouring the 3 R's of Indigenous Research Methodologies

Literature review/document analysis of Shawn Wilson's "Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods"
Ethnography and multi-site fieldwork
Interviews with researchers and performers

In this review, Virginie Magnat describes Shawn Wilson’s work regarding Indigenous research methods, and in particular how this applies to her own work in theatre performance. Virginie Magnat uses ethnographic praxis in her research where she studies embodied work of women artists from different cultures and generations. Within this article Magnat utilizes Indigenous research methods as a form of resisting dominant colonial ideas of research and reinforces the importance of relationships and relationality.
"In my embodied research on the work of women artists from different cultures and generations who collaborated with Jerzy Grotowski during the theatrical and post-theatrical periods of his practical investigation of performance, I found these principles more pertinent than the methodologies developed by those whom Wilson identifies as "dominant system" academics (58)." (Magnat, 2014)
"Substituting the actions of searching, gathering, harvesting, creating, transforming, and
sharing for the notions of fieldwork, informants, data collection, and the dissemination of
research outcomes simultaneously foregrounds the embodied dimension of the research
process and the researcher's responsibility for practicing her craft and developing her expertise ethically." (Magnat, 2014)

Utilizing Cree scholar Shawn Wilson's practice for ethical and meaningful engagement in Indigenous research: Respect, reciprocity and relationality (the three R's)
Positionality, lived experience, and embodied ways of knowing
Indigenous research methodologies include a type of ethical relationship and framework to include embodied performance

Resisting dominant theoretical frameworks
Changing the view on ethnographic fieldwork from colonial origins to invite Indigneous research methods
Arguing for a different ethnographic model which can account for lived experience of researcher and participants
Advocating for "respectful performance pedagogy"
Argues for "reciprocal appropriation" to respectfully engage research between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people

Multi-site fieldwork conducted by researcher from 2008-2012
Part of overarching research project, monograph: Grotowski, Women, and Contemporary Performance: Meetings with Remarkable Women

Advocating for larger pedagogical and epistemological research changes within the academy

"In my embodied research on the work of women artists from different cultures and generations who collaborated with Jerzy Grotowski during the theatrical and post-theatrical periods of his practical investigation of performance, I found these principles more pertinent than the methodologies developed by those whom Wilson identifies as "dominant system" academics (58)." (Magnat, 2014)

"Substituting the actions of searching, gathering, harvesting, creating, transforming, and sharing for the notions of fieldwork, informants, data collection, and the dissemination of research outcomes simultaneously foregrounds the embodied dimension of the research process and the researcher’s responsibility for practicing her craft and developing her expertise ethically." (Magnat, 2014)

Theatre Research
Indigenous research methods
Anthropology