Contribution short abstract

This work explores how positionality evolves in transdisciplinary research through the River Co-learning Arenas framework. Drawing on river cases in Latin America and Europe, it shows how researchers navigate fluid roles, relational encounters, and ongoing reflexivity in multi-actor collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation reflects on the evolving and situated positionalities that emerge when engaging in transdisciplinary river research through the framework of River Co-learning Arenas (RCAs). RCAs can be defined as a space for co-creation of actionable knowledge between activist researchers and grassroots social movements. While RCAs was conceived as a pathway to revitalize relationships between rivers, people, and more-than-human communities, its practice, continually reveals how positionality is constitutively shaped through the encounters it sustains.

Drawing from experiences in RCAs in Latin America and Europe, I examine how positionality is not a static declaration of identity or standpoint in these spaces, but a fluid, relational, and negotiated practice that changes through encounters between the multiple actors involved in RCAs. These engagements often unsettle the researcher’s assumptions, motivations, and attachments, calling for forms of continuous—or relational—reflexivity that exceed anticipatory models of positionality declared at the outset of a project. Instead, RCAs demonstrate how new subjectivities and understandings emerge through conflict, dialogical processes, and exposure to plural ontologies and ways of knowing.

The presentation discusses the methodological and ethical challenges that arise when the researcher acts simultaneously as facilitator, catalyst, translator, and political actor within RCAs. These roles involve forging connections across scales, navigating the challenges of holding space for marginalized imaginaries, and engaging with decolonial and embodied methodologies that integrate sensing, feeling, and thinking. They also require acknowledging the limits of reflexivity itself, recognizing that full transparency is impossible and that power circulates in ways that are never fully graspable.