When I started researching polyamory in 1996 there was hardly anything written about it and only a handful of people were even studying it. Less than 10 years later the field had really begun to expand and it was clear that folks interested in academic research on polyamory and other forms of consensual non-monogamy needed a way to share ideas, get support, and ask methodological and publication advice. To address that need, Cascade Spring Cook, Pepper Mint, and I started PolyResearchers as a Yahoo group.
For almost 15 years, the Yahoo group PolyResearchers hosted fantastic discussions about how to find research resources, ways to increase sample diversity, the best graduate programs for studying polyamory, and where to publish articles and books on polyamory. We had some heated conversations about how to define polyamory, the appropriateness of defining it as NON-monogamy (comparing it as an absence of what it is not), and so many other fascinating topics that they blur together in my mind in a swirl of intellectual cooperation and discord. Over the years we grew to include over 300 members based on continents around the world.
Now the group is renaming itself PolyamoryResearchers and moving to a more sophisticated platform, IO. We are in the process of migrating all of the amazing resources we built up over the years, including an extensive collection of publications on polyamory and rich discussions about sampling and other methodological issues.
If you are an academic, researcher, student, author, or some other kind of professional interested in the scholarly side of polyamory, please consider joining us at https://groups.io/g/PolyamoryResearchers Please be aware that PolyamoryResearchers is not a good place to find partners or advice about how to manage polyamorous life — there are other websites for those needs. It is specifically for academic discussion of scholarly issues, announcements of calls for proposals for conferences, publication opportunities, and sharing research resources.
