We know our place: Indigenous community research and the ever-evaporating critical qualitative research tradition

The purpose of this paper is to use the experience of attempting to locate funding for three contiguous components of a research program to be undertaken in remote areas of Queensland to reflect upon the increasing challenges to critical qualitative research in the Australian context.

This paper utilizes forms and formats of the composite narrator, narrative inquiry and autoethnographic techniques in putting their lived experience into the context of the neoliberalized university.

As the research team developed and pursued a funding application through various university committees, the value of their work and the ways in which they were being increasingly marginalized qua researchers became starkly apparent to them.

While Appadurai’s concern was to try to understand the inexplicable and seemingly inordinate fear of small numbers that, in contemporary times, causes large majority groups to launch horrendous campaigns of erasure against miniscule minority groups, the authors wonder whether the same concern of an ascendant majority is not at play in strategies of erasure being deployed in contemporary research paradigm skirmishes. Regardless, the authors are rapidly approaching the point where perhaps the authors, as critical qualitative researchers, should fear any numbers, big or small.