Domain Overview

Researching the Research is a nested, ongoing reflection and analysis of the strategies used to facilitate interdisciplinarity within the NFRF-T Smartwear Revolution team, and relationships between researchers and PLEX.

Researching the Research aims to document our research process in order to share with community partners and the public, to foster understanding & collaboration between team members across disciplines, and to formalize and publish best practices and methods for future large interdisciplinary projects that center persons with lived experience. Data collection and analysis will be conducted with consent of all participants per the University of Alberta’s Research Ethics Office (REO) guidelines and approval for Human Research Ethics.

Our approach recognizes analytic and methodological frictions and gaps as productive sites to better understand interdisciplinary co-design. Through diverse arts-based, ethnographic methods, critical discourse analysis and an intersectional framework, we invite team members to critically reflect on their own disciplinary epistemological assumptions and experiment with how these tensions might offer productive opportunities for collaborative exchange. Through this iterative study we will guide the co-design process itself as well as contribute to a better understanding of how to conduct interdisciplinary research across large scale teams towards transformative impact.

Researching the Research includes participation across all three working groups, including Art and Design Working Group (ADWG), Social Justice Working Group (SJWG), and Technology and Textiles Working Group (TTWG); and is led by Dr. Reisa Klein and Dr. Vivian Mushahwar.