Research collaboration and sustainability: taking it slow

One of the big issues that we are all facing in our lives and (to greater or lesser extent) in our research, is that of sustainable futures: how can we ensure that we are creating a world where everyone is empowered to ‘make informed decisions in favour of environmental integrity, economic viability and a just society for present and future generations’ (UNESCO 2021, p.1)? In relation to education, questions arise around what sustainable education means, and how sustainability relates to research methods in education. UNESCO’s sustainable development goals relate explicitly to the provision of ‘inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning education for all’ (United Nations 2015, p.18), and implicitly link to education in terms of the contribution that education can make in our progress towards all 17 sustainable development goals. Sustainable education, then, is both about ensuring our education is inclusive, equitable, and high-quality, and about learning how we can live in an environmentally and economically sustainable and socially just way, so we can create sustainable futures for forthcoming generations. Turning to research methods in education, these relate to sustainability in terms of the methods we use to research sustainable education, and to research education that helps make progress towards the SDGs, but also in terms of how we can ensure that our methods themselves have environmental integrity and are socially just. Last year’s double Special Issue in the International Journal of Research & Method in Education, on Racially-Just Methodologies (Rizvi 2022a, 2022b), brought to the fore conversations around racial and social justice in our methods. These conversations are continuing and are opening up discussions about what is valued as method and methodologies, and whose traditions are drawn upon in our approaches to research. Another strand to the conversation around sustainable research methods, however, also includes that of environmental sustainability. Below, we consider how one aspect of environmental sustainability that of international travel relates to building research relationships and sharing of ideas and ways of thinking, and as such might help us step beyond traditional colonial approaches to educational research methods. Aswemove into apost-covidworld,manyof us are enjoying the return to in-person interaction, but also valuing the flexibility that a more digitally-focused world brings. On the face of it, our increasing digital literacy (which the covid pandemic necessitated) has meant that we now have more flexibility in interactingwithothers fromaround theworld, andweareno longer reliant on international travel to meet with others. Researchers and academics were forced to become more digitally-literate as a profession during the pandemic (e.g. Keen et al. 2022; Roberts et al. 2021). This has meant that we have expanded our repertoire of what is ‘normal’ in terms of interaction with others. Meeting colleagues and research participants online is now commonplace, as is remote working. We have become used to working collaboratively with others in online fora and travel is no longer seen as necessary in research collaboration. We do not have to fly across the world to meet with our fellow researchers, when interaction by video chat andworking simultaneously on online documents is now so commonplace.Weexploreddigitalmethods and ‘E-research’ in our 2015 special issue, but the context ofwhat is possible and widely-used has moved on since then. As new technologies are developed, new possibilities for research and research collaboration open up, and newways of usingmore established technologies are also considered.