Meeting at the crossroads: Re-conceptualising difference in research teams

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to attempt to theorise difference as encountered by a team of six diverse researchers interested in addressing cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education. Drawing Todd's (2003, 2011a,b) concepts of the crossroads, becoming present and relationality in conversation with Barad's (2003, 2007, 2012) ideas around relationality and intra-activity, the paper explores how difference in team research might be re-conceptualised. The aim is to theorise difference, differently from Other methodological literature around collaborative research. Typically, this work highlights markers of difference based on researcher identity (such as gender and ethnicity) as the source of difference in research teams, and examines how these differences are worked through. The aim of this paper is not to resolve difference, but understand it as occurring in the relational process of researchers becoming present to each other. Difference that is not understood as the product of the individual (Barad, 2012), may engender an orientation to ethical relationality, whereby research teams might hold in tension a conversation between the individual and the collective.