The Research-­Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory brings researchers at the University of Alberta together with national and international affiliates interested in developing a critical discourse of research-creation attuned to social justice. The CoLAB currently links researchers from the faculties of Arts, Education, Physical Education, Native Studies, and Faculté St. Jean at the University of Alberta, and from Concordia University, York University, Université Laval, Emily Carr University, the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), the University of New South Wales. If you are interested in affiliating with the CoLAB please do not hesitate to contact us.

The CoLAB started in 2013 (-2016) as the Research-Creation Working Group, funded as a Research Cluster by the Kule Institute for Advanced Study. CoLAB activities are currently funded by the Social Science and Research Council of Canada with ongoing support from the department of Art & Design at the University of Alberta, .

Our 2020-2023 research theme is Art, Activism, and Global Crisis (developed in collaboration with the SPAR²C (Shifting Praxis in Artistic-Research / Research-Creation) Faculty of Arts Signature Area of Research and Creative Collaboration).

Artistic practices and forms have a critical role to play in times of crisis. Art seeds the critical and speculative imaginations needed to trouble our current ways of living and dying; it prioritizes aesthetic and affective spaces within which we not only reflect on what is so, but work on imagining and modelling things otherwise in ways that are both integrative, in terms of transforming the materiality of daily life, and excessive, in terms of reaching beyond what we currently know to be possible. During the 2020-2023 thematic arc, the CoLAB will address the theme of Art, Activism, and Global Crisis through a series of outreach events that include public-facing presentations, masterclass workshops (held virtually), an eColloquium accompanied by an online exhibition, and an open-access online publication. Nurturing critical thinking on art, activism, and social/ecological justice, these outreach events will increase knowledge of artistic forms, theories, and methods informed by ecological, decolonial, and anti-capitalist ethics at a moment of global crisis.

This theme follows and builds on our 2016-2020 research theme: Art(s) and the Anthropocene, the central questions for which were: (1) how does debate on the Anthropocene (and related though not equivalent concerns with climate change) shift how one engages in meaningful arts practice and theory today? (2) how might a non-­human exceptionalist/multi-­species approach to our environment offer a particularly potent way forward in the face of anthropogenic climate change + how do the insights of feminist, decolonial, and critical disability studies reshape Anthropocene discourse? (3) what can research-­creation, as an epistemological and methodological intervention into traditional scholarly research practices, contribute to these debates within and without the academy?

Our Fulbright scholar during the 2019 academic year was Tom Rice.

Located in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan) on Treaty Six territory, the CoLAB works to build research-creational capacity and political agency by bringing local practitioners, researchers, and students into conversations with scholars, artists and activists from across the country and abroad, thinking through what it means to make art informed by social and ecological justice politics responsive to the demands of planetary crisis.