Lab desires: How do we want to be?

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Our lab is a place for experimentation, playfulness and creativity. Part of our activity entails design, inventing games, crocheting, drawing and mapping.

With all its openness and exploration, the lab fosters accountability to the research fields, our scientific communities, our co-laborators, our friends and partners and ourselves. We believe that unless explicitly challenged, individualistic tendencies will increase in academia and beyond are increased. Therefore, by committing to support each other, we commit to being accountable to each other. Whenever we give advice, we relate to each other’s challenges; we do not distance ourselves after the session or project ends.

We believe in the value of equity, emphasizing different social positions and histories. Equity differs from equality in that it aims not to treat every person the same (here we follow and agree with CLEAR’s Lab book, see p. 2). Different people have different competencies and struggle with different things. We acknowledge the different positions, and we work on methods to enact equity.

• The lab is a place that encourages and is accountable for diversity (gender, nationality, language, preferences, abilities and political points of view).

• The lab is a safe space. We can present the wildest ideas that are not in the shape of being put into traditional academic formats of presentation.

• The lab is a composition of many individual research interests. While we in general share approaches and methods, it does not exclude anyone for their research topic. The lab is a place to foster strange cross-relations between research fields by looking for similarities instead of differences. In that way, we can partially connect our fields and controversies, materialities and ecologies.

• Everyone is invited to stay a member when they leave university. We hope the lab reaches beyond our time as students, professors, post-docs or PhDs.

• We need to take care of our rooms. The lab is also the space. We have in mind that there are other academics at RUB that urgently look for rooms and we have the luxury of having our own.