ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the ways in which bell hooks’ work, and in particular her ‘ethic of love’, has helped an ongoing international collaborative research project with peace education goals (EdJAM) to work towards and be accountable to its underpinning values. We are aware that power imbalances shape the landscape in which research projects take place, including those resulting from legacies of colonialism, incentive structures in academic and professional careers, funding agendas and structures, hegemonic languages, time pressures and much more. These can lead to epistemic injustice, silencing and silences within research projects. Our approach has been to acknowledge these possibilities consciously and collectively and then to try to work against (and at times within) them through the values we agreed in developing the project: Reflexivity, dialogue, co-responsibility, respect, generosity, creativity and sustainability. When developing the values, we did not speak explicitly of hooks and her work, but as we have put them into practice, we find ourselves turning regularly to her wisdom. Engaging with hooks’ work has helped us to unpack the relationships that form the basis of EdJAM, to recognise our complicit roles in power structures, and create ways of ensuring critical ethical practice of responsibility and change together as a team.
