The qcollaborative undertakes design research projects that extend and interrogate the lab’s commitments. In response to our reflection on the last year and half’s work, we have decided to refine our commitments and to describe our work as critical feminist research.

qLab asks its members to engage with qLab commitments as emergent and iterative practices that we work through together in qLab projects. Participation in a qLab project means participation in the development and articulation of the following practices:

1. qlab is grounded in intersectional feminism. Our feminism is informed by Black, Indigenous, trans, and queer feminisms and our work thus seeks to decenter white, colonial, cis, heteropatriarchal frameworks in favour of intersectional feminisms. We amplify the work of feminist scholars and activists who identify as women, non-binary, gender non-comforming, BIMPOC, LGBTQ2+, and/or disabled.
2. qlab is a public research lab. We expect, welcome, and respond substantively to rigorous critique. While our making is contextualized and theorized in terms that can be recognized as scholarly inside the academy, we are committed to engaging with people outside the university, with transparency and accountability, to effect demonstrable positive social change.
3. qlab values collaborative, community-based research. We acknowledge that any “new” ideas are outcomes of previous insights and practices, collaborative explorations, and a politics grounded in action. We value intellectual development from all collaborators in terms of monetary compensation, intellectual property, and/or individualized mentorship.
4. qlab generates new concepts, new forms of praxis, and new forms of techne. Through practice, experimentation, and reflection, we strive to discover different means of achieving the preferred futures that our feminisms imagine.
5. qlab addresses “wicked problems”, or complex, unsolvable problems that can only be approached by engaging multiple conceptual paradigms, processes, and stakeholders. Rather than solutions, we aim for better ways to move forward together.
6. qlab works at the intersection of performance and technology, because we see that as a volatile site of social change, particularly influential upon young people and hence upon the future, which is not yet well understood.