Guidance for researchers

A few notes on how we like to work so you can tell if we are a good fit  …

At CoLab Dudley we try very hard to practice a relational ethos in all areas of our work. This relational ethos applies as much to our creative practices in place as it does our research and learning. In essence, this is about trying to be in right relationship with place, with land, and with community. It is an ongoing practice of care, reciprocity and responsibility to our human and more-than-human kin.

How does this show up in our learning relationships?

Rather than disempowered and objectified research subjects, or decontextualised case studies, we are much more interested in becoming learning companions with you.

As learning companions, grounded by mutual care and reciprocity, we would commit to actively erode knowledge hierarchies and institutional norms that undermine, co-opt or even erase everyday knowledge production in community.

As learning companions we wouldn’t have one off conversations, or interviews with strangers we never hear from again. 

Instead we would engage in a long term learning relationship that was mutually nourishing and grounded in re-inhabitance and alternative futures building by repairing our relationship with land and rest of nature.

As learning companions, we wouldn’t contribute to academic publications hidden behind paywalls that no one it talks about can access.

We don’t like wall building, or any form of enclosure to be honest, so instead, we would be commoning our shared knowledge for collective good.

Why do we think this way of learning and researching together is important?

The opposite to a relational ethos is an extractivist ethos.

Sadly, an extractivist ethos can be present in some form or another in typical community-researcher relationships - no matter how hard researchers work to disrupt it.

This is an ethos directly and indirectly formed by colonial practices and legacies including power over research subjects, discovery for control, categorisation and collection for othering.

Today that ethos can show up as harm caused by:

• collecting knowledge without meaningful consent.
• collecting knowledge without accountability or responsibility to community, to land or to futures.
• individualising not collectivising benefit via authorship / data ownership held by the researcher/ institution.
• ways of working wholy determined by short-termism, productivity and cost-efficiency. These are integral to an extractive capitalist economy that has highjacked relational time and replaced it with deadlines for ‘impact generation’ and so economic value for the industrial knowledge complex.

We know there is another way to be in a learning relationship

We love coming into learning relationships that are orientated towards commoning knowledge and power. These relationships are shaped by caring, creative, generous and joyful ways of being, that help co-create conditions for regenerative resilience as an interconnected and interdependent living system.

Maybe you feel that way too?

If so, how exciting! We’d love to chat and begin our shared learning journey.

However if this all feels a bit too much, we totally get it, so let’s not waste time we both want to use differently.