Doing Conceptual Multiplicity: Working cosmologies together and separately in research services delivery

At the 4S/EASST conference in 20202, this group prenseted a Making and Doing exhibition called ‘Making and Doing TopEndSTS – on country (and online)?’ That presentation took the form of a website, and displayed a number of collaborative research projects working at the intersection of Indigenous and other academic traditions. Read together, this collaborative initiative explored what it means to do research and differing epistemics together in ways that entwines technologies of representation and people in generative ways. In revisiting this collaborative work again in 2021, we extend this initial exploration. This time, focussing up the tension between collaborative project research in northern Australia often carried out as a practical task of delivering state funded research-services, and the efforts through which this work may retain the epistemic flexibility to ‘work different cosmologies together and separately’ as a key element of generative research work. In presenting stories from our respective research sites, we suggest beginning with conceptual multiplicity offers one way to work with an often-assumed contradiction between generative research and services delivery.