intersectional feminist design research lab
intersectional 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

about qLab

Founded in 2015 with the support of an Ontario Early Researcher Award, 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 across North America. We maintain a continuous virtual presence right here at qcollaborative.com and a timely material presence wherever qlaborations are happening.

feminist placemaking

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

We're considering the nature of spaces co-created by performance, media, text, and interactivity.
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design for social justice

We are interested in projects that pursue strategies for mending existing social fabrics or creating new ones from whole cloth.
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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.
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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.
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Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation

This is a virtual reality performance and artifact remediation in development for the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project, funded by a SSHRC Partnership Development grant. The final release will be launched in Nova Scotia in April 2019 and will be assessed as a tool for restorative pedagogy in grade 11 Nova Scotia classrooms in October 2019.
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2019 events

  1. Jun 02

    Materializing the Digital: Feminist Spaces for Young Audiences’ Agency in Digitally Mediated Environments

    This panel introduces a central research thread of the newly-founded qcollaborative, an intersectional feminist design research lab with nodes at the Universities of Waterloo, Mount Royal, and Illinois (qcollaborative.com). Our interest in performance and technology in public practices arises out of our founding convenors’ longstanding commitments to the digital humanities, which is, as a field, increasingly attentive to the material and embodied environments in which our tools and methods are deployed. In this panel, we articulate four approaches we are taking to the question: How can we use materializations of the digital to increase the positive impacts of digital tools and encourage healthy interactions with them?

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