How can we break down the borders of our intellectual communities, for them to be more inclusive, egalitarian, humble, and radical in impacting the world? 

That will be the question we would like to explore, collectively, during this lunch event.

This lab brings together scholars committed to building an alternative academia grounded in openness, collaborative processes of knowledge creation, and horizontal solidarity. We draw on our diverse experiences of attempting to create such alternatives from two distinct yet interconnected perspectives. The first, as Indigenous and minority scholars as well as those with strong ties to Indigenous and marginalized communities who enact an ethic of knowledge creation based on indigenous, feminist community intellectualism and horizontal solidarity. The second, as scholars who have attempted to create spaces within academia that refuse its competitiveness and performativity and enable us to share and create knowledge in more open, honest, collective, and supportive ways. These efforts collide with the larger, vertical concerns of capitalist systems that generate precarity and harm both within and beyond academia. In seeking to transform existing power structures, we thus consider how the knowledge we create is intertwined with the world at large, in a sense always already collective.

Under the themes of transformation, collectiveness, and co-creation, we wish to bring together academics who have similarly worked within, created, or imagined alternative research practices and forms of intellectual communities to share their experiences. Our aim is to highlight how collaborative research structures and processes of knowledge creation can be built, both among scholars and between scholars and the communities with whom they work. What does it take to make such practices and spaces sustainable and ethical? Can we imagine them as a vehicle for wider, structural changes within academia, and if so, how?

As this event will be run as an open space, it will welcome several discussions and collaborative reflections, and co-creations on the question of transforming academia, and our intellectual communities. We will tackle, among others, issues of equality, data sovereignty, indigeneity in academia, solidarity, collectiveness, and the language of critique and transformation itself…

This open space aims to be a time where we can co-imagine the way to transform our ways of doing, based on honest, creative, and radical discussions and collaborations, that can extend beyond the 75 min allocated to the event.