Workshop Series Details

This workshop series has been created for graduate students by graduate students. It aims to address a current training gap by building the necessary knowledge, skills, and confidence to do respectful research.

What is Respectful Research?

Respectful research is grounded in the principles of reciprocity, action, and anti-oppression.

It involves questioning our own position within systems we operate in and identifying our sources of power. It is finding the confidence and skills to use this power to make real change in our research and workplaces. It means addressing oppression within the academy (like what happened to Jocelyn Bell Burnell when she discovered pulsars or how Indigenous people lost their Indigenous status if they attended university in Canada). Respectful research demands bravery from the researcher.

Bravery in Research

Bravery is defined as having strength to face danger, fear and difficulty; it means to endure with courage. Building from our shared experience of being in graduate school (never an easy position), this workshop series asks you to bravely step forward to explore how you can work differently. If we do not learn to work differently, we risk unintentionally doing harm in our work. 

Some of the learning (and unlearning) will be uncomfortable as we gain awareness of our own privileges and, maybe even, previous missteps. This unsettling complexity will be supported and challenged with care, accountability and compassion acknowledging that we are all in a process. Resources for further exploration will be available.

This consciousness raising is meant as a point of action to reimagine our work and to move our workplaces into more equity spaces. 

Session Details

Workshop Date Workshop Title Learning Objectives
Nov 8th, 2019 (1-4pm) Gaps, Dead-Ends and Dilemmas: Unlearning Harmful Research Practices
  • Learn important language around oppression
  • Defining one’s own positionality
  • Recognize how positionality and colonialism impact graduate research
Dec 9th, 2019

(1-4pm)

Disruption, Action and Advocacy: Building Core Skills and Confidence
  • Value role in creating anti-oppressive research and workspaces
  • Practice identifying internalized oppressive ideas, assumptions, and praxes
  • Devise an action plan around one way they will decolonize their research and/or education
Jan 23th, 2020

(4-7pm)

Innovation and Impact: Preparing to work differently independently
  • Identify ways in which action plans were successfully (and not as successfully) implemented
  • Adapt action plan based on learning and group input
  • Describe workshop impacts and next steps

Location

The xʷθəθiqətəm or Place of Many Trees at the Liu Institute for Global Issues (UBC – Vancouver Campus, 6476 NW Marine Dr, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2)

Register for the Workshop Series

We strongly encourage people to attend all three as these workshops build on each other. That said, we understand life may make this impossible. You are invited to attend as many as you can.  

Sign up here.

Contact Us!

If you have any questions or concerns about the workshop series, please email us at  contact.dandelions@gmail.com.