Members of qCollaborative (qLab) participated in this year’s DH Unbound virtual conference which took place from May 17th – 19th. Drs. Jennifer Roberts-Smith (Brock University), Shana MacDonald (Communication Arts), Brianna Wiens (English Language and Literature), and Aynur Kadir (University of British Columbia) presented on the nature of the qLab and how the lab has enabled collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship and become a space of friendship and care. qLab was designed as a space to better articulate how feminism can be incorporated into design practices, materializing the digital, and remediating lived experiences into social justice design.
Brianna opened with the history of qLab and provided a land acknowledgement. She discussed her positionality within qLab as she joined when she was a PhD student at York University and now operates within the lab as a faculty member in the English Department of the University of Waterloo. Her research, her identity, her heritage, and her family are all aspects that inform her work, and the qLab provides her with a space where her identity is valued.
After Bri’s introduction, the presentation was structured as a Q&A for qLab members to speak on their experiences within the Lab. The first question asked was, “how has qLab troubled and transformed what it means to think about what a lab is?
For Aynur, as the latest member to join qLab, it was the lab’s commitments that attracted her to join. qLab provided a space for critical friendship, care, and slow design and functioned differently from more traditionally structured STEM labs. Shana spoke about the collaborations that qlab has enabled allowing her to lean upon her colleagues when she needs to rest and let someone else take the lead.
The second question asked was, “what does lab ‘care’ actually entail?” The members each spoke on how they supported each other during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic by having bi-weekly check-ins and how they involved each other in their classes as guest lecturers. This provided students with greater access to research and scholarship while in lockdown, as well as providing Lab members with ideas and initiatives that they can use to support their students’ mental health.
Next, an audience member asked, “what is needed for equitable relationships to become possible?” Aynur touched on the ideas of trust, care, and slowness that stems from indigenous and feminist methodologies and how they apply these ideas to both their academic and personal lives. Shana spoke on how she has encountered grad students who had inequitable experiences with their supervisors, and Bri added to this, saying she wouldn't have known she was in one of these situations during her PhD if she weren’t connected to the lab.
The last question asked was, “what do care, relation, equity, and trust look like in practice?” The qlab members talked about different definitions of “labour” versus “work” and different interpretations from Chinese and Western perspectives. They concluded that “work” and “labour” are seen and valued differently with work in Western perspective being seen as of more value than labour which is associated with physical and menial jobs. Going further, they touched on the concept of emotional labour and how overlooked it is in relation to work, arguing that it should be better recognized within academia.