Following Primates: Approaching Conflict in Contested Regions

When conducting research in community-based settings, it is natural for conflict to arise as the practices, motivations, and imaginaries of researchers and local stakeholders converge. As designers, the question, then, is: “In what ways can we engage with conflict to arrive at constructive outcomes?” In this paper, we employ ethnography and a mapping workshop with an environmental research group facing conflicts at a contested ecological site. We unpack some of the ways in which local conflicts over data, mapping, and technologies around community-managed forests are intertwined with broader socio-political, historical, and value-based contestations. We find that conflict serves as a critical site for negotiating community engagement and configuring collaboration. Accordingly, we provide strategies for surfacing, navigating, and staying with conflict in contested settings. For community-based researchers, this requires resisting the natural tendency to seek an immediate resolution to the conflict, thereby creating room to deepen attachments to matters of concern.