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.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems