International research collaborations: Building a stronger research team across disciplines and geographies

Collaborations among researchers across academic institutions have been integral to the research process, involving merging the expertise of team members to achieve desired research objectives. The importance of emphasizing collaborations among individuals, sectors, and institutions has grown for securing research funding, especially when spanning disciplines and borders, highlighting knowledge production's contextual nature. However, the driving force behind these collaborations has often been project achievement, sometimes overshadowing the essential emphasis on the collaboration process.

Being an ethnographer working on migration issues across spatial and temporal scales, I have been a part of inter-, multi-, and trans-academic collaborations and have worked together with non-academic partners for years. In 2022, when I got an opportunity to become a part of the DemiKnow research team, I was beyond excited to collaborate with Canadian, Indian, Chinese, and Australian partners to explore the complex roles of families in migration in diverse geographical contexts. Moreover, the DemiKnow project aims to generate valuable insights into the collaborative process among international research partners from the so-called global south and global north. Being a global south researcher who has worked on migration issues in the institutions in the global north for a decade, I was eager to learn about, and actively contribute to the development of the effective methods for overcoming structural and cultural barriers in order to develop a more equitable partnership among international research teams. 

What is important to note here is that research collaboration is inherently a social process, in which researchers from varied educational, professional, and cultural backgrounds work together to accomplish a collective project goal. Despite the clear demarcation of the project structure and allocation of roles and responsibilities, there is a constant need for interpersonal relationships to discuss, review and monitor the joint progress and resolve issues. As a result, efficient coordination among team members is an integral part of any collaboration process. In many cases of international collaboration, including Demiknow, the geographical distances among partner universities, funding limitations, short timeframe, and recent COVID-19 pandemic restrictions often limit the team’s interactions to online forums, such as Zoom, MS Teams, and emails. Although remote work and online platforms have become today’s norm, DemiKnow team's reflections during their in-person meeting in Melbourne, Australia (24-30 July 2023), in which I participated, serve as a noteworthy illustration of how spatial proximity promotes synergistic interactions and motivates team members to engage in a more effective collaboration process. 

The formal and informal conversations during the DemiKnow team meetings, each team member’s presentation during World Sociology Congress, coffee/dinner meetings, and the visit to the Immigration Museum provided an opportunity to take part in the reflective process. First, we took a step back and reflected on what we had learned from the individual research projects, including the insights from the research findings and the challenges encountered during the research process. Second, the in-person meetings helped us reflect on and discuss the expectations and diverse academic cultures and also the structures to manage multiple complexities in international collaboration, such as the data sharing process, financial and administrative management, and inclusion of team members in co-authorship. Third, openly sharing feelings and concerns among each other helped us strengthen social ties among the team members, enhancing trust among each other and thus turning professional relationships into friendships. Fourth, the open and free-flowing team meetings and reflections in Melbourne not only enhanced our cultural competencies but also provided much-needed space to counter the normative understandings of migration. As the team members from India, Australia, and Canada together brainstormed ideas for a future project, there was a common consensus that we should not be re-producing a unified hegemonic knowledge about the roles of families in migration decision-making.

Being a part of Demiknow’s participatory approach to knowledge production, I have realized the significance of fostering geographical and disciplinary diversity in a research project in creating an academically and culturally rich learning environment. Furthermore, such international multi-disciplinary collaborations between the global south and the global north help us contest the normative assumption of the superior figure of the researchers from the global north and the claim that the research (designed and) produced from the global north has a higher value. The DemiKnow project has provided a platform to combine resources and expertise across disciplines and borders to examine the roles of families in migration and thus inform the global landscape of migration research, policy, and practice. Given that the close physical and social proximity of the team members seemed to encourage morale and motivation of the team members, there was a general consensus in Melbourne for a need to organize annual team meetings to reflect on each research project’s progress, contemplate the collaboration process, and ensure professional growth and development of the team members.