critical feminist design research lab
critical feminist design research lab
what we do
university of waterloo, mount royal university, university of illinois
university of waterloo, mount royal university, university of illinois
who we are
collaborative; interdisciplinary; interested in making as a method
collaborative; interdisciplinary; interested in making as a method
research areas
emergent and iterative
emergent and iterative
projects & ideas

Statement from qcollaborative about Anti-Black Racism:

As we witness the events unfolding in the United States and Canada following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, D’Andre Campbell, Tony McDade, Riah Milton, Dominque “Rem’mie” Fells, and too many others, we come face to face with the countless ways that academic institutions have upheld and maintained–and continue to uphold and maintain–racism, discrimination, and oppression.

Today, we re-commit ourselves to intentionally shifting our work towards anti-racist activism and we re-affirm our support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The worlds of performance and technology could not exist without the work and voices of Black artists, researchers, and scholars. We are making a commitment to increasing the representation, participation, and voices of Black, Indigenous, mixed race, and people of colour (BIMPOC) in the qCollaborative. This includes diversifying our research group, amplifying BIMPOC voices in our scholarship, and continuing to take up projects that decenter existing white cishegemonies.

Our support of the Black Lives Matter movement and other anti-racist movements cannot be contained to one day, or one week, or one month of activism. The fight for BIMPOC rights and lives has been an ongoing fight for centuries, and we have far to go in making meaningful change and visible progress. In this moment, we revisit our foundation in and commitment to the practices and values of black feminist activism and intersectional, queer, and trans inclusive feminism. We continue to educate ourselves and others on these crucial matters, listening to and learning from the Black voices that have been speaking for years.

Supporting social justice movements requires action. We commit to:

1. amplifying the voices and work of Black, Indigenous, mixed race, and people of colour by leveraging our academic privilege;
2. diversifying our lab membership to include more LBGTQ2IA+ and BIMPOC members; and
3. contributing to the development of knowledge structures that centre LBGTQ2IA+ and BIMPOC ideas, ways of being, and experiences.

Check out our non-exhaustive list of readings by BIMPOC scholars, artists, and activists here.

about qLab

qlab is located in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Waterloo, the School of Communication Studies at Mount Royal University, and the College of Fine & Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our members work with universities, private industry, government, and not-for-profit organizations in the Americas and Europe. The qcollaborative undertakes design research projects that extend and interrogate the lab’s commitments. Our projects are typically collaborative, paced to encourage reflection, and funded (by grants or industry partnerships). We seek to create safer, more inclusive public spaces for marginalized and targeted communities. We are committed to challenging and changing unjust behaviours such as racism, colonialism, (cis)sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ablism, classism, and xenophobia wherever they occur, including in academia, in social justice movements, and in ourselves.

feminist placemaking

We seek to better articulate how feminism does and can operate in public spaces through the lens of performative social media interventions.
Read More

materializing the digital

Through the process of making, thinking, and remaking, we explore the personal, social, and ethical consequences of abstracting people, environments, communities, or experiences into digitally-based data.
Read More

remediating experience

We're considering the nature of spaces co-created by performance, media, text, and interactivity.
Read More

design for social justice

We are interested in projects that pursue strategies for mending existing social fabrics or creating new ones from whole cloth.
Read More

SOME OF OUR PROJECTS

Activating Interpretation

Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, we explore a set of working hypotheses about experience design in the digital humanities, focusing primarily on the preparatory and departure experiences that occur in liminal spaces around the principal event.
Read More

Materializing Data

Shame is something that is felt so deeply and is so troublesome and is so disruptive to a person’s life that we wanted to show this in a way that in itself is disruptive. Hence our choice of an equally disruptive material: tampons.
Read More

Theatre for Relationality

“Theatre for Relationality” is developing a new approach to audience development that inspires positive social change through collaboration with community partners.
Read More

events & presentations

The qcollaborative undertakes design research projects that offer potential to extend and interrogate qlab’s commitments. We share our work as much and as often as possible.
Click to View Events Page