Using Research Blogs to Combine Community and Capacity Building in the FEELed Lab

The FEELed Lab is an interdisciplinary environmental humanities lab of the University of British Columbia, Okanagan (UBCO), located on unceded syilx territory in Kelowna, British Columbia. Led by Astrida Neimanis, the lab includes faculty, students, community members, and partners who contribute to its goals in diverse ways. The FEELed Lab focuses on promoting feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, queer, and disability justice perspectives to engage with interlocking socio-environmental crises, particularly as they manifest in this place, on unceded syilx territory. The name “FEELed Lab” plays on the concept of field labs and field stations more common in the natural sciences as places for gathering data about the adjacent “nature.” But as well as gathering data, field labs also gather people, who work and sometimes also play and live together. In this sense, field labs also build and become social infrastructure and community. The FEELed Lab reimagines the field lab concept by positioning feelings and community building as central to environmental inquiry. These feelings include those tied to climate change research and climate justice, such as anxiety and grief (Neimanis and Hamilton), but they are also more generally about the work of “feeling things out.” This is particularly important as we strive to make mainstream environmental science more diverse and inclusive of Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities, and queer and disabled perspectives (Johri et al.).

Knowledge about the lab’s theoretically informed practice-based research has been published in conventional academic fora; however, the FEELed Lab also prioritizes community-oriented publishing and knowledge mobilization. Building community is both the aim and process of the lab’s knowledge mobilization strategy. In keeping with this orientation, the lab has produced a range of non-academic outputs, including zines, workshop methods, a documentary, and artistic projects that engage broader publics, and centre collaborative forms of knowledge.

The lab’s website serves as a central archive and repository illustrated especially through the FEELed Notes blog series (see www.thefeeledlab.ca/feeled-notes/). These research blogs provide event summaries, workshop invitations, more general project updates, and other developments happening in and around the lab, including reflections from lab members on their work in ways that expand into more theoretical ideas and contextual frameworks. Thereby, these blogs offer context and a sense of continuity of happenings at the lab. Monthly summaries of new FEELed Notes posts are shared through our newsletter, the FEELed Guide, which improves their distribution.

The research blog format also makes our work more accessible than other publication formats and allows us to share information in a more timely and democratic manner. The open access format accommodates multimodal, experimental contributions including photo essays, poetic texts, and zine-inspired works. Those contributions facilitate broad and accessible sharing beyond traditional academic platforms. As informal and often personal communications, they also offer a means of relaying the lab’s relational, affective, and interdisciplinary approach that allows us to share the vibes and values of the lab in a tangible way.

These publishing opportunities have been especially helpful for those without publishing experience to get practice writing for different audiences and becoming acquainted with publishing processes. These contributors receive editorial guidance in producing public humanities scholarship, while also being encouraged to find and develop their own voice. As students, lab members, and community partners are regularly invited to contribute to FEELed Notes, we have created a low-barrier platform for them to share their thoughts, voice, and perspectives.

From Research Blogs to a Potential FEELed Magazine

One special feature of the FEELed Notes has been a series of essays by undergraduate students titled “Outstanding Feelz.” In contrast to most other FEELed Notes posts, these essays are more thematically focused. Rather than offering project-specific updates or reflections, they engage more broadly with the lab’s thematic research areas. Some examples include imagining the future of campus using Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism (Packo, “Cultural Resilience”) as well as solarpunk principles (Packo, “Reimagining”); or describing connection to local places as a means of considering eco-cultural identity and obligation (Rader). For many students, this is their first publication experience, which can also be a valuable addition to their curriculum vitae. While still in an early exploratory stage, registering the series with the Government of Canada to obtain an International Standard Serial Number (a unique 8-digit identifier for serial publications) could enhance the citability, visibility, and discoverability of student work across academic and library databases (Simpson et al.). With this next step we hope to strengthen our existing blog platform while deepening its role in sustainable and inclusive publishing in a student-centred way. We aim for these contributions to offer students an accessible first step into publishing while engaging meaningfully with the lab’s intellectual and environmental concerns.

Hopes and Implications

We have focused on building our research blog archive as a way of responding to the increasingly urgent stakes of knowledge production, specifically questions of who gets to speak, be heard, and archived. We see this as a growing platform for amplifying diverse voices and sustaining inclusive, evolving forms of scholarly engagement. Our hope in sharing how we use research blogs as a knowledge mobilization tool in the FEELed Lab is to offer a model for how practitioners can leverage existing work (rather than always creating new content) to improve accessibility and foster inclusive archiving and knowledge production and mobilization practices. By encouraging students and contributors to write for public audiences, this approach also supports those who may not yet have access to more traditional publishing platforms. More broadly, it contributes to the expanding ecosystem of open resources and their potential for knowledge mobilization in Canada (Imagining the Future).

As calls to decolonize, democratize, and reimagine academic and public knowledge intensify, we feel there is a growing need for publishing models that honour situated, affective, and speculative forms of thinking. Our understanding of sustainable publishing is grounded in the lab’s commitment to feeling as a mode of knowing and relating. This means creating accessible, evolving archives that continue to expand what counts as knowledge and who is invited into its creation. We aim to build an archive of feeling (Cvetkovich) of perhaps ephemeral experiences and emerging or marginalized perspectives and knowledges. Being sustainable, this kind of publishing is gentle, reliable and easily accessible—in other words, it allows us all to share and accrue knowledge in ways that are also sustainable for ourselves and communities. This publishing also expands the notion of which perspectives, topics and formats are classified as dealing with the topic sustainability.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge that the physical home of the FEELed Lab, Woodhaven Eco Culture Centre, is located on the ancestral territory of the syilx Okanagan people. This land was never ceded and the FEELed Lab is committed to building relationships and activities that recognize, honour, and contribute to the stewardship of the syilx people of this land, which has been ongoing since time immemorial. We are grateful to Astrida Neimanis for their support and encouragement in writing this article.