Location: Zoom Room A / Salle Zoom A
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8075386377?pwd=QGMSB3uhyUxwIbvOIzkUanoMoqRkOX.1
• Sunita Nigam, “Governing Better Futures: Piloting New Approaches to Equitable Governance in Academia and Beyond”
• Jeff Gagnon, “Community Driven Research at SBF/MSMA: Scaling Up Relational Ethics”
• Luciano Frizzera, “Archiving Better Futures: Platform Governance and Data Sovereignty in Community-Driven Archive Collections”
Staging Better Futures / Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs (SBF/MSMA) is a Canada-wide, multilingual knowledge co-creation and mobilization partnership that brings together 12 post-secondary institutions, nine theatres, nine professional associations, as well as student and artist-educator consultants. This cross-sectoral partnership seeks to make equity-oriented interventions into systemic structures that shape the teaching and learning environments for post-secondary theatre and performance studies in Canada.
Through community-driven research and knowledge-sharing, with a focus on community-driven co-creation practice, this bilingual project aims to develop and sustain equity, diversity, and inclusion by fostering decolonization, anti-racism, anti-ableism, gender/sexuality inclusivity, and multilingualism within the teaching and learning environments for post-secondary theatre and performance.
The proposed panel is made up of three postdoctoral fellows engaged in research into developing different aspects of this large-scale project: governance (Nigam), ethics (Gagnon), and archiving platforms (Frizzera). We would like to present early findings in our work and invite conversation, questions, and the sharing of new trains of thought from the audience.
Governing Better Futures: Piloting New Approaches to Equitable Governance in Academia and Beyond,
Sunita Nigam (Brock University)
This talk is an invitation into the process of creating an equity-oriented governance framework and culture for the multi-sectoral, Canada-wide Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership project, Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs (SBF/MSMA). Over seven years, SBF/MSMA aims to enact equity-oriented systemic interventions within the context of postsecondary theatre studies in Canada by bringing together 120 individuals to address the barriers to Decolonization, Antiracism, and Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DC/AR/EDIA) in this sector. Because governance is a vital arena for creating or removing barriers to equitable institutional and political participation, SBF/MSMA is piloting new mixed-method approaches to the development of an equity-oriented governance framework and culture for its partnership. This process—which draws on methods from a Community-Driven Research Framework that recognizes community members as co-researchers, involving them in “phases of research such as study design, implementation, data collection” (Manzo et al. 3)—is being mobilized as a case study for generating new data on the design of equity-oriented governance practices, archiving platform governance, policies, and frameworks in academia and the arts. This talk will invite the audience into a discussion about key questions and challenges that are arising throughout this process of developing a governance framework for SBF/MSMA and engage collective thinking about methods for improving equity in governance in the arts, academia, and beyond.
References
Manzo, Rosa D., et al. “A Community-Driven Research Framework: Integrating Promotores as Co-Researchers.” Progress in Community Health Partnerships, vol. 17, no. 4, 2023, pp. 689–98, https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2023.a914125.
Community Driven Research at SBF/MSMA: Scaling Up Relational Ethics
Jeff Gagnon (University of Waterloo)
For decades, academic institutions have had to reckon with the ways in which the conditions of knowledge production traffic in colonialist (L. Smith; Deloria, Wilson), sexist (Ahmed), and racist (Moden and Harney) scholarly practices. Such unethical knowledge production frameworks are not only potentially damaging to those who are the subject of inquiry, but they have a negative effect on the quality of research being produced (Rawat and Meena).
Working on a large-scale, intersectional, knowledge co-creation project intended to centre the voices of vulnerable communities has necessitated the development of different approaches to ethical methods that goes beyond merely satisfying the “minimal” (Lahman) ethics of institutional review boards. Satisfying aspirational ethics that go beyond this minimum means engaging with the diverse ethical standards of a broad constitutive community. Such standards may fluctuate, may arise in response to current events, some are based in respect for long-standing traditional ways of knowing, and some reside in tension with each other.
This paper will share early research and findings in the development of ethical methodologies grounded in relational design and community-driven research methods as well as in the Utility, Self-Voicing, Access, Interrelationality (USAI) Research Framework developed by the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres.
References
Ahmed, Sarah. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press. 2019.
Deloria Jr, Vine. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. U. Oklahoma Press, 1988.
Lahman, Maria K.E. et al. “Culturally Responsive Relational Reflexive Ethics in Research: the Three Rs.” Qual Quant 45, 2011. 1397-1414.
Moden, Fred & Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. 2013.
Rawat, Seema and Sanjay Meena. “Publish or perish: Where are we heading?” Journal of Research in Medical Sciences. 19(2). February 2014. 87-89.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and
Indigenous People. London: Zed Books. 2012.
Wilson, Shawn. Et al. Research & Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of
Knowing Through Indigenous Relationships. Toronto: Canadian Scholars. 2019.
Archiving Better Futures: Platform Governance and Data Sovereignty in Community-Driven Archive Collections
Luciano Frizzera (University of Waterloo)
Platform governance and data sovereignty present significant challenges in the context of community-driven archive collections. These digital repositories, often built on collaborative platforms, face complex issues at the intersection of technology, policy, and cultural heritage preservation (Rolan et al., 2020; Thorpe, 2024). The intersectionality and decentralized nature of community contributions raise questions about data ownership, access control, and long-term sustainability. Furthermore, the global reach of digital platforms conflicts with localized notions of data sovereignty (Gillespie, 2018), particularly for indigenous and marginalized communities. Data sovereignty is not merely a technical challenge but a deeply political negotiation of power (Barbosa & Grohmann, 2024), representation, and collective memory.
SBF/MSMA aims to amplify, mobilize, and archive existing and emerging knowledge and resources for DC/AR/EDI-focused post-secondary theatre education. In partnership with the Collaboratory for Writing and Research on Culture (CWRC), SBF/MSMA plans to extend CWRC’s existing functionality with features urgently needed across the research data management ecosystem. These functionalities must be accompanied by a set of policies that follow FAIR (n.d) and CARE (Carroll et al., 2020) principles to regulate the infrastructure, which includes protocols for data sovereignty and multilingual interface.
This paper argues that effective platform governance must move beyond traditional regulatory models to embrace participatory design principles that center community agency. It discusses the tensions between open-access ideals, the need for culturally sensitive data stewardship, and the technical challenges in implementing governance frameworks that respect community values while ensuring the integrity and accessibility of archival materials.
References
Barbosa, A. C., & Grohmann, R. (2024, November 2). Big Tech Sovereignty: Platforms and Discourse of Sovereignty-as-a-service. AoIR, Sheffield. https://www.conftool.org/aoir2024/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=238#paperID668
Carroll, S. R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O. L., Holbrook, J., Lovett, R., Materechera, S., Parsons, M., Raseroka, K., Rodriguez-Lonebear, D., Rowe, R., Sara, R., Walker, J. D., Anderson, J., & Hudson, M. (2020). The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19, 43. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043
FAIR Principles. (n.d.). GO FAIR. Retrieved December 6, 2024, from https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/
Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press.
Rolan, G., McKemmish, S., Oliver, G., Evans, J., & Faulkhead, S. (2020). Digital equity through data sovereignty: A vision for sustaining humanity. iConference 2020 Proceedings. https://hdl.handle.net/2142/106548
Thorpe, K. (2024). Returning love to Ancestors captured in the archives: Indigenous wellbeing, sovereignty and archival sovereignty. Archival Science, 24(2), 125–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09440-2
Luciano Frizzera (University of Waterloo)
Bio: Luciano Frizzera is a graduate of Concordia University with a background in Media Studies and Digital Humanities. As SBF/MSMA’s digital humanities postdoctoral fellow, his research is focused on machine learning, datafication, and platform governance.
Jeff Gagnon (University of Waterloo)
Bio: Jeff Gagnon is the community-driven research methods postdoctoral fellow at SBF/MSMA. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto with a background in performance and settler colonialism.
Sunita Nigam (Brock University)
Bio: Sunita Nigam is SBF/MSMA’s governance postdoctoral fellow. She is a graduate of McGill University. Her research focuses on popular performance and theory.