Authentic Relational Communities
How do the structures we create shape the insights we discover? The Center for Integrative Relational Health's intensive 10-week summer graduate research fellowship brought together five scholars from diverse disciplines to explore authentic relational communities. The fellowship revealed that systems and processes themselves are active agents in knowledge production - and discovered that studying genuine connection requires becoming a relational community themselves. Through the conditions they established—reflective check-ins, transparent dialogue protocols, and structured space for productive tension—they didn't just support their cohort’s learning; they generated it. Through transdisciplinary collaboration, these fellows developed five methodological insights that challenge traditional academic research by positioning relationships as the primary methodology, creating a "Middle Way" of integrative relationality that bridges community wisdom with scholarly rigor. Their work demonstrates how community-engaged research can move from knowledge extraction to knowledge co-creation through sustained, embodied relationship-building.
A Collective Reflection from the Center for Integrative Relational Health's Summer Fellowship Program
Research Insights from Transdisciplinary Graduate Research
Collaborators: Christine Chandran | Jaelle Faison | Imma Honkanen | Ayman Mir | Sarah Oh
This research explored what it takes to build authentic relational communities. Different audiences will find different insights most valuable. Choose your pathway below.
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Glossary for this Article
Throughout the fellowship, the researchers found themselves returning again and again to certain concepts - not to fix their definitions once and for all, but to explore how language itself shapes relational work.
Some terms came from specific cultural or spiritual traditions (like al-ghaib from Islamic knowledge systems). Others emerged from the fellows' collaborative inquiry (like "cascading vulnerability" and "productive tension"). Still others represent core frameworks developed at the Center for Integrative Relational Health.
About the IRH Graduate Summer Research Fellowship
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A 10-week intensive graduate research fellowship brought together five scholars whose research centers on building authentic relationships within communities facing systemic disconnection.
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Five graduate researchers from transdisciplinary design, public health, sociology, educational psychology, and theological studies—each bringing distinct methodological approaches to questions of community wellbeing, relational health, and systemic transformation.
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Rather than conducting traditional isolated research projects, these fellows created a living laboratory for the relational principles they sought to understand. Their collaborative inquiry produced methodological innovations that challenge how academic institutions approach community-engaged scholarship.
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In an era of increasing social fragmentation, this fellowship demonstrates that authentic research into human connection requires not just studying communities but creating them through the research process itself. The insights generated offer concrete pathways for researchers, practitioners, and institutions to move from extractive to generative approaches in community work.