LJP is designed as a collaborative, participatory project that is grounded in research justice.
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The first phase of Living Justice consisted of multiple years of intensive training, observation, and interviews as well as conversations with key stakeholders—including students, instructors, and authors—within various ESJ workshops, webinars, and certificate trainings.
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Phase 2 of the project, which commenced in 2022, was based on a detailed, inductive analysis of these data, as well as an explicit commitment to shaping the next phase of the project in direct relation to our “right role” in investigating, representing, and documenting as well as potentially contributing to this emergent community, specifically as white researchers situated within a large state academic institution.
Overall, we took great care in developing a fully collaborative framework here, in which we invited potential participants to become co-investigators as well as named co-authors. We further adopted an explicitly trauma-informed, embodied approach that prioritizes the agentive participation of collaborators at all stages of the project.
Our commitment, here, was to create the conditions for the kind of curious, experimental co-investigation that could only emerge from letting trust, vulnerability, and playful co-consideration develop over time
One email, sent out in August 2022 through Embody Lab* inviting anyone interested to sign up directly for an initial one-on-one or group conversation/interview via Calendly.
Potential collaborators were offered a $50 e-gift card for participating in the initial interview and an additional $100 for participating.
Within less than 24 hours, we had over 50 collaborators and many others on the waiting list.
Included one-on-one or group conversations of up to 4 collabs, beginning in September 2022 and extending through December 2022
Each conversation lasted 2 hours, sometimes more
During initial conversations, we addressed a range of topics, including : Collaborators’ current understanding of terms such as “social justice,” “embodiment,” and “liberation”; how these definitions have taken shape as embodied experience in and through particular encounters over time
Throughout the conversation, we further engaged in several short, guided microphenomenological or “MP” interviews. MP is a guided interview technique that invites interlocutors back to a particular, chosen moment in order to further investigate their embodied experience in that moment (Petitmengin 2006)
All of these conversations emerged as intimate, often-vulnerable co-investigations that continue to take shape in ongoing forms of communication, support, and co-investigation in the present
Between October and December 2022 we conducted three collaborative ethnographic “time capsules” last 5 days each.
The time capsule method is often associated with documentary film: Footage is generated by participants in a “crowdsourcing” format that is inherently collaborative and participatory (Kapur 2018).
A glimpse into this particular moment in history, when there is so much injustice and so much harm AND so much possibility, hope, desire, and social action as we work together to unsettle systems of oppression in ourselves and our systems.
A collection of images, recordings, reflections and anything else we’d like to include
The co-creation of an immersive project that is bigger than any one of us alone; supporting & strengthening community connections.
Collaboratively enacting the role of memory-keepers, not to withhold memory from others as in Morrigan Phillips’ story “The Long Memory” (Octavia’s Brood) but rather to share it as widely and broadly as possible.
During each of the LJP time capsules, collaborators were invited to contribute photographs, video- and audio- recordings, and text-based reflections in response to a series of prompts and projects using the mobile ethnography application, EthOS App.
In order to provide a vulnerable space in which collaborators could later choose to clarify or anonymize specific contributions, we designed the Living Justice EthOS interface such that collaborators were crafting their own individual multi-modal essays (e.g., unlike social media, collaborators could not see one another’s posts).
Following Indigenous researcher Shawn Wilson’s framing of “research as ceremony” (2008), however, we also formulated each time capsule as a collective, community-building experience consisting of both opening and closing circles as well as “daily drop-ins.” Roughly half of LJP, ollaborators, finally, wore the Empatica E4 wristband during initial conversations as well as during the time capsule.
As part of the project’s commitment to integrating methods from biocultural-medical and linguistic anthropology, a selection of collaborators further opted in to wearing a low-burden wristband, the Empatica E4 to track shifts in their sympathetic nervous system during initial conversations as well as during the time capsules.
Beginning in March 2023, LJP began holding open, monthly meetings for all collaborators who are interested in contributing to the ongoing organizing, coding, analyzing, curating, and presenting LJP material, which include 700+ photographs, videos, voice-recordings, and text reflections contributed via EthOS app; 200+ hours of video and transcripts from recorded conversations; and 100+ hours of physiological data that will be time-matched with recorded interactions during the initial interview o time capsule.