Threading the Strands

The final chapter identifies some critical lessons learned during an eight-year project. Many in the team had worked on large grants and/or on ethnographic studies. Developing a new version of ethnography, however, required creative teamwork. So did moving beyond narrower forms of interdisciplinary and international research and more traditional approaches to mentoring in order to ensure collective, consultative, reflexive, as well as continuous knowledge creation and sharing. This chapter argues that such creative team work depends on building relationships and on organizing meetings that are stimulating intellectually and move the research forward. Those meetings must also be fun. Creative team work also requires significant preparation for the site visits, especially when those visits are intense and involved highly vulnerable populations. It means mentoring through sharing the entire research process in egalitarian ways. Finally, it means thinking about what happens to the team and the data after the funding ends.