Community-based research in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

This paper examines the rewards and problematics of doing community-based research in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. British Columbia, It examines how the research process, experiences, and goals of a project may differ depending on one's social location in and outside of the project. Further it highlights collaboration and tensions, especially about class, privilege, and ways of knowing, between faculty, research assistants (RAs), and community-based researchers (CBRs). The Health and Home Research Project, Housing and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver (H&H project) can be understood as space where collaboration occurred and where structural and personal relations, identities, and the replication of dominance prevailed,

Cet article examine les gains et problemes souleves par la recherche a base communautaire dans le Downtown Eastside de Vancouver, Colombie-Britannique. Il examine la facon dont le processus de recherche, les experiences et objectifs d'un projet peuvent varier selon sa situation sociale a l'interieur et l'exterieur du projet. De plus, il porte a I'attention la collaboration et les tensions entre professeurs, assistants de recherche et chercheurs communautaires, surtout en ce qui a trait a la classe, le privilege et les modalites du savoir. Le projet de recherche. Health and Home, House and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, peut etre envisage comme un espace ou la collaboration a eu lieu et ou les relations et identites personnelles et structurales, ainsi que la replication de la dominance ont perdure.

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One of the primary goals of a research project in downtown Vancouver was to provide a space for the voices of low-income women on the links between health and housing. The project, "Health and Home Research Project, Housing and Health among Low-income Women in Downtown Eastside Vancouver, British Columbia" (H&H Project), was designed to "explore" different ways of doing research that would include the "women as both researchers and research subjects" (Robertson & Culhane, 2005, p. 8). In 2002, project coordinator Dara Culhane and I discussed the possibility that I would interview a sample of the community-based researchers (CBRs) and student research assistants (RAs) who had worked on the Project. (1)

My distance from the everyday running of the project and my familiarity with the Downtown Eastside (DTES) influenced my decision to work on this component of the Health and Home research. I believed, as did the other members of the project, that the CBRs and RAs had much to contribute about their experience of community-based research in the DTES. I also thought that their voices would contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of collaborative research and to the creation of guidelines for future community projects. In addition, I was interested in how the DTES and the H&H Project would be represented by the CBRs and the RAs.