our commitment to care-laboration
Care is integral to the survival, security, and wellness of 2SLGBTQIA+, racialized, disabled, and equity deserving peoples across the world. Community based mutual aid strategies are essential to resisting and decolonizing hetero-patriarchal, racist, ableist, and colonial systematic policies in our universities. More importantly, as written by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, “Our communities have shown up to care for each other in the midst of a global pandemic and extreme economic, political, and social instability.” (2023: 3). Practicing mutual aid and care is particularly urgent in our classrooms and universities, as these are places where students, researchers, and collaborators experience some of our most pressing social, political, and cultural events and learning. Our universities, particularly in North America, are institutions built on colonialism, that continue to uphold white, western, and heteronormative logics of knowledge production and knowing.
Prioritizing care-full pedagogies and care-laboration especially related to media production and technology is vital to students’ and researchers’ wellbeing, success, and scholastic and knowledge production. Frameworks of care are particularly important for students, researchers, and collaborators who are gender non-confirming, racialized, disabled and underrepresented in STEAM workplaces, labs, and institutions.
surveillART prioritizes creating spaces of compassion, healing, and care when using the space and its equipment. All researchers, artists, students, and community members using the space deserve respect, access to a quiet and productive workspace, and be free of harassment and discrimination.
research-(care)ation
A thought experiment by Stéfy McKnight
*please note, this is a living document and is continuously changing. I invite you to return to this page in the future to read new additions and/or further experimentation.
I wish I could rewrite my doctoral thesis everyday. I'm often embarrassed by its framing of research-creation, the thoughts and skepticism I had as a graduate student about how it was understood by academics across the country, written about, celebrated, or the hope that many had for its ability to change the institution through social justice led pedagogy. The conclusion in particular is arrogant and aggressive, and I sit in this thought every so often, especially when I should be asleep. But, I don't regret it, especially now.
In the conclusion of my dissertation completed in 2020, I wrote, "I argue that research-creation in Canada is a methodology that can perpetrate colonial ideas and values," at a time when scholars were championing research-creation as a method that can combat these systems. To be clear, I have/had hope in research-creation as a method for engaging in activism and social justice (like Natalie Loveless in "How to Make Art at the End of the World"), but I was skeptical because as a graduate student, completing their doctoral degree during a global pandemic, I felt the limitations of my practice. I saw colleagues of mine struggle to complete the art they wanted to due to lack of studio spaces and funding. During my degree, I was frustrated that international students were not eligible for SSHRC funding, despite tuition being astronomically higher than those of domestic students, and having research-creation projects too. The pandemic made this far harder when graduate students at my institution pleaded that the university give us tuition waivers and accommodations. It felt elite, in ways that contradicted with how I hoped the university could function with research-creation, like we read it could.
In 2017, as a graduate student, I founded the UAAC Reearch-Creation Caucus. It's an annual opportunity for research-creationists to meet for networking and mentorship. Every year the same topics of discussion arise, "we are working in silos," "each university tackles research-creation differently," "I don't know how to write a persuasive research-creation SSRHC application," "I am constantly over validating my practice," "I don't have the space or resources to do my work," and "I need help."
Research-creation has a history of rethinking traditional ways of knowledge making in the academy and has been defined as centering social justice and activism. (Confente, 2024; Bahng et al. 2022; Loveless, 2019) However, as we know, institutions continue to privilege western logics through the marginalisation of queer, disabled, Black, Indigenous and People of Colour scholars, students, and artists. This is particularly true when assessing which research projects are funded, who is hired, how students are treated and supported, which students have access to labs and resources to produce their art, which classes are cut or on hold due to budget constraints, and who have the financial capacity to afford tuition and access to the university.
I am addressing this thought from the perspective of a tenured research-creationist at an Ontario university and as a first-generation student who has relied on OSAP to fund my academic training. I’m privileged to have my research-creation work funded in one way or another since my Master's of Art, and now as tenured. Though, I am also a non-binary queer and bipolar research-creationist who feels the barriers of these institutions particularly how our work and existence is constantly dehumanized. We are numbers and statistics in Self Identification Surveys that are required by universities to incentivize our institutions to accommodate us. Rarely, the accommodations are adequate. For many of us, doing research-creation work is a form of survival. A way of finding a community and healing in the chaos.
Currently, our education and its funding is under constant attack from the Ontario provincial government. We have the lowest "level of post-secondary education funding in Canada." (Romard, 2025). This lack of funding and institutional support inevitably targets our equity and social justice driven pedagogy and research methods. Now, OSAP has been drastically reimagined making access to Ontario universities far more difficult than in recent years. As a first generation undergraduate student (then graduate student), I relied on OSAP alongside working 3-4 jobs a year, most times 2-3 at the same time. My art was a way of surviving, but I don't think I could have afforded to be a student now.
This inevitably leads me to ask, who has the privilege to fairly access the spaces where research-creation thrives and exists? How can we continue to produce arts-based research centering social justice, when the institutions where we do this work are not always available to those who need justice? Can we move research-creation outside of the institution as a form of survival, healing, and mutual aid?
In the introduction of her text "How to Make Art at the End of the World," Natalie Loveless writes "I continue to see research-creation as one of those cracks (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen) that lets the light shine in, through its experimental and dissonant forms of practice, research, and pedagogy (...) and mobilize research-creation as a mode of resistance to individualist, careerist, and bibliometric university cultures." (2019: 8-9) Loveless also offers that research-creation "gives those of us operating as artist-researchers/researcher-artists the opportunity to re-envision and re-craft — to re-story — our practices and labor, and, perhaps most importantly, our pedagogy, within university ecologies". (27) With the increase scrutiny of equity related research and programming, we are aware of how our disruptive and action-oriented research and pedagogy are challenged. Research-creation as a method is not immune to these systems - but it (has) gives(en) us hope.
I recently came across a recorded lecture from Natalie Loveless from February 27 2021 (published online via Youtube on February 27 2025) titled "From Relational to Ecological Form." She begins her introduction by addressing her 2019 book and how some of the her thoughts about the conclusion have shifted. She says, "What hasn't shifted are any of my arguments about research-creation as pedagogical intervention within university spaces. What has shifted is my sense of hope for the future of the university, for the future of my university, given the specific intersections of crises that have configured the past 18 months for me and many of us." After listening to this talk, I felt validated in some of my worries I've held since my PhD, but more urgently, I felt scared. I no longer feel alone in the hopelessness in the future of our institutions, and that has led me to feel empowered to do more.
I'm not sure how else to think through the present state of the university, hope and research-creation without absolutely centering care, and making care and mutual aid at the centre of research-creation, even as a term. As such, I've been dabbling with the term, "research-(care)ation" since I became a faculty member at Carleton University in 2020 (see PROTOHYVE), as a way of thinking through the tumultuous feelings I've had with this method.
Research-(care)ation builds on Loveless' interventions to "care differently" and to think about how we can create care-full art that disrupts the institution, by considering art methodologies as spaces for mutual aid and survival. Research-(care)ation is not a replacement for research-creation or a critique, rather it’s a reminder that research-creation and care are one. Parallels. Hyphenated. Codependent. Necessary. Survival. Borrowing from Saidiya Hartman's concept of "care is the antidote of violence," I consider how we can use care through our artistic practices as a method of imagining, producing, and engaging a better world (2022). The surveillart: care-laboratory hosts a team of queer, settler and racialized students and artist-scholars. Perhaps we ask, 'how to make art to survive the end of this world?"
At my university we are not only grappling with the suffocating loss of equity led positions, faculty retention, cancellation of equity courses, and closure of equity programs, we are also battling the creation of "impartiality and institutional neutrality policies" that affect our ability to mobilize and stand in solidarity with students and the world more globally, and the creation of a task force that seeks to create an environment for community healing and belonging, but have embedded terms of non-partisanship and civility in its mandate, further alienating and harming the communities that need said healing.
Research-(care)ation is a method for creating art that resists extraction and settler and western logics of knowledge production in the academy, especially amidst unprecedented attacks on education funding, equity initiatives, student enrolment, and tuition support. The government that has consistently attacked post-secondary education and health care is implementing policies (see Bill 5) that extract Indigenous land and challenge Indigenous sovereignty.
More widely applied, research-(care)ation invites artist-scholars to create artwork that disrupts colonial-capitalist and heteronormative logics of control, displacement, land management, and extraction by providing and sharing access to space, technologies, and resources not equitably distributed everywhere. It does this by bringing art and technology to places physically outside of the university - for instance, in rural northern Ontario communities, for workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions, and experimentation. Research-(care)ation as a concept and methodology braids generative ways of creating new knowledges through the creative process, centering care and healing practices, and in turn creates artistic research with and for communities most impacted by these logics. It highlights the care-centric models of social justice and activism noted by influential scholars (like Loveless) in the field and reminds me (perhaps us), that we need care now more than ever.
For many, the hyphen in research-creation is a space of connection, relationality, and experimentation, where research and creation are co-creators and collaborators in the creation of new knowledges. (Foran and Xherro, 2024; Paquin and Béland, 2016; Chapman and Sawchuck, 2012) For research-(care)ation, the hyphen is care. Care is integrated at all processes of the creation, collaborations, thinking, making, failing, and reimagining. Care is extended to how we supervise and provide opportunities to students, fund research-creation projects, uplift the expertise of marginalized creators and makers, and how we engage our labour.
Research-creation has the incredible potential of resisting traditional knowledge production in the academy. For some art making is survival. Fur us, research-creation is survival. How we work together to survive in the academy and world more broadly matters.
We hope to find antidote to extractive colonial logics using research-(care)ation and care work more generally.