This blog post was written by the new FEELed Lab Administrator, Julia Jung.
As of this year, we have the first full cohort of students at the FEELed Lab. This has made us reflect more on the specific ways we want to be as a Lab, ways of working together and planning for the future. As a part of that, we have started the process of articulating our lab values.
So far, the FEELed lab has been dedicated to research, practices and approaches that are feminist, anticolonial, antiracist, queer and disability-justice oriented. But what does that mean on a specific, daily basis? This is what we want to establish with our Lab values.
For this, we are taking inspiration from other labs and organizations including the CLEAR Lab, the Feminist Media Studies Lab and the Cobra Collective. As Astrida described in a recent FEELed Note, other labs can help us to imagine ourselves into being. By learning about the processes others use to find their values and the ways they put them into practice, we have some guidance for our path and inspiration for what is possible.
Our plan for developing our lab values is to hold a series of mini-workshops using different methods throughout the year.
We held our first workshop on October 28 using the rich pictures method. We thought a good way for starting to think about our values would be by looking closely at the things we are already doing at the moment – our lab practices. We drew one rich picture representing the current situation of the FEELed Lab to understand all our current practices, relations and responsibilities.
From our conversations while drawing, we developed our list of Lab practices.
Then we drew a second rich picture imaging the FEELed Lab in 3 years and thought about what we wish for that situation. Three years seemed like a good time horizon to let our imagination wander but still stay rooted in what might be possible…
The FEELed lab 