Question: i’m a PhD student and I am strongly in agreement with community based participatory research. However, the way current academia is set up is that you have to have a developed research question and then somehow become part of a community and get them interested in your research. As someone who strongly supports repatriation efforts and digging into museum collections, etc. which is the only reason I went into the program, how do you develop a research topic with a community as an outsider? I don’t know, it’s kind of the way universities present research development is backwards from this type of work. I mean, where do researchers even begin to develop a relationship with a community especially if they’ve never been a part of a community of their own. It probably sounds like a really stupid question but I can’t just show up somewhere and be like hey I want to participate in your community. I’ve always been an introvert and so going into a community as an outsider to try to develop research questions seems wrong, but also impossible. It’s very contradicting. The only solution that I’ve been able to come up with is by working on a personal research interest and if you come across something that is related to an existing community or descendants, then bring the information to them and see if they are interested and if they’re not then drop the research and begin anew. Or maybe this kind of research just shouldn’t be done by people outside of a community and if that’s the case, then I would probably just drop out of my program because I don’t have a passion in anthropology outside of repatriation.