The IRK Lab centres insurgent and resurgent knowledges of structurally precarious people.
It is a virtual space to support and expand coalitional, collective, and caring research ecologies that are not typically recognized by educational institutions.
While we each come to the institutional space of the university by different paths and routes and with various influences, challenges, and commitments, our goal is to support sustained networks of knowledge that promote well-being for human and more-than-human beings, whether or not this knowledge is deemed scholarly.
Collectively we share a desire to support, engage and foreground the work that we were most interested in but that is not always recognized as knowledge.
The IRK Lab offers a space to stand in unity against the often-corrosive practices of the institution, so that we can allow for the development of our thoughts, proclivities, hobbies, activities, and desires to be mutually cultivated.
In bringing our connections to communities, political commitments, lineages of knowledge and histories, we hope to grow a sense of collective work and connection among broader communities.
And we seek to cultivate rebellious relations that remind us of the futures we are making possible.
We, tentatively at first, then more intentionally have fostered caring and reciprocal relations and practices with each other.
These practices are undergirded with emotional attachments to each other, empathetic responsiveness to each other's lived experiences, and analytics of caregiving and care-receiving embedded in power - these help us collectively re-envision the “possibilities for transformative, intellectual, academic, and political engagement” (Chowdhury and Philipose 2016, 7).
We acknowledge and celebrate each other's milestones, share resources and (academic and non-scholarly) knowledge for each other's family members and communities, uplift each other in our various stages of childcare, exchange photos of our creative endeavours and the food we grow/cook, and make space for everyday life and larger life events, whether joyful or painful.
We share food and music and jokes; we laugh and are cheeky and playful; and we plan for our visits together, remaining flexible, prioritizing each other’s well-being.
We envision the IRK Lab as a place where we can forgo the demands of an unforgiving and corrupt institution (‘the university’) and instead as a space that works collaboratively.