Inter-logues: and Relational Healing, Decolonising Psychology, and the Work of Reconnection
This conversation begins with arrival: noticing body, temperature, birdsong, and the settling that makes understanding possible. From there, Cynthia Lubin Langtiw introduces Inter-logues as a relational and methodological practice that refuses the artificial separation between researcher, participant, and question. Inter-logues, she explains, are the chapter in the research process that explicitly asks: How did the research change you?
Rooted in Haitian cultural ways of knowing, ancestral presence, and community-centred wellness, Cynthia traces how her values were clarified over time, including through the experience of being positioned as “the other” in clinical psychology training that centred teaching the majority how to treat ethnic minorities. She shares how Inter-logues emerged through witnessing transformation in others’ research journeys: a dissertation reshaped by grief after the loss of a baby, and another shaped by the emotional weight of Islamophobia narratives that demanded space for metabolising what the work was doing to the researcher.
Across the episode, Cynthia and Tracie explore how Inter-logues relate to reflexivity, bracketing, and rigour, while moving beyond checkbox approaches that aim to remove the researcher from the process. Instead, Inter-logues name interdependence and the “alchemy” through which knowledge is made. The conversation also turns to ethics, institutional constraints, and the academy’s fixation on perfect finished products. Cynthia argues that education, if done right, transforms us, and that institutions must learn to support the process, including the shaky places where learning and creativity emerge.
The episode closes with Cynthia offering a short poem, an invitation that distils the method: Inter-logues are an act of care that honours relational knowledge, becoming, and the truth of transformation.
What this Episode Offers
A clear, teachable definition of Inter-logues as the chapter in the research process that explicitly asks: How did the research change you?
A move beyond checkbox reflexivity toward a deeper, accountable naming of researcher transformation
A re-centring of interdependence in qualitative research, refusing the artificial separation between researcher, participant, and question
A culturally grounded epistemology rooted in Haitian relational language, ancestral presence, and embodied knowing
A critique of expert-driven and individualised clinical models that erase community and collective knowledge
Practical illustrations of how research shifts researchers, including examples from dissertations shaped by grief and systemic trauma
An ethical invitation to practice reflective accountability to participants, to the story, and to oneself
A decolonial disruption of academic perfectionism through the practice of “making peace with the shaky places”
Insight into how Inter-logues can transform the training of clinicians, researchers, supervisors, and teachers
A model for integrating personal, cultural, and methodological dimensions without collapsing rigour
A call for institutions to value process, transformation, and becoming, not only polished products
