The Reparative Research Studio

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1.  How is this research situated within the planetary metabolism? Research is not separate from the world—it is part of the planetary body. Does this study contribute to cycles of extraction, or does it nourish regenerative systems? Does it participate in life’s composting and renewal, or does it just accumulate?

2.  Where does control masquerade as care? Interventions in nature and society are often framed as acts of care, but they can also be mechanisms of control. Does this research seek to metabolize and heal harm or simply manage it? How can care be reimagined in ways that don’t seek domination or affirmation?

3.  What does this research assume about other-than-human beings? Does this study treat land, water, and non-human beings as objects to be studied—or as subjects with agency and intelligence that are participants in the research? Does this research assume we are separate from these beings or entangled with them, and what responsibilities and epistemic implications follow from this assumption?

4.  Where is the potential harm in this research? Research can cause harm not just through intent, but also through neglect, omission, or unintended consequences. If this work were to cause harm, what would it be? Does this study remove knowledge, data, or labor from a community, ecosystem, or way of knowing without consent and reciprocity? What safeguards could be built in to try and prevent harm? 

5.  How does this research account for systemic inequities? How does the research take into account the disproportionate impact of the issue being examined on marginalized communities? How, if at all, does the project serve these communities? Is there any risk the project will further marginalize them? How can it be more accountable to these communities, even if not conducted in direct collaboration with them?

6.  What is the theory of change? How do we think the project will bring about change? Which (human and other-than-human) communities will benefit most from this change? Which communities might be negatively impacted? Does it attempt to produce and impose a one-size-fits-all solution? What would happen if the research embraced site-specific, relational, or plural interventions instead?

7.  What does refusal make possible? When research encounters resistance—by human communities and more-than-humans—it is important to respect refusal as a boundary. Who might refuse to participate in this research, and why? How can we ensure refusals by communities and knowledge holders will be honoured rather than worked around? How do we recognize refusal beyond human voices?

8.  Should this research happen? More research is not always the right answer. What if the right move is unlearning, pausing,or redirecting resources rather than producing new knowledge? How can we balance responsibility with the humility of knowing that some harms can never fully be addressed? 

9.  What structural constraints shape this research? How do academic timelines, funding structures, and publication pressures limit possibilities for repair? How can this research strategically and carefully challenge institutional expectations while prioritizing the integrity of relationships and the depth of inquiry? How do we resist the temptation to perform research for grants, careers, or recognition?

10.  How will we decide which norms to follow, bend and which to break? Every discipline has ruling norms and imaginaries, not all of which are explicit, or conscious. Reparative research will likely require us to discern among which norms we can follow, bend, and break – how will we do so? Who will decide?

1.  What wound is this research addressing? All repair begins with acknowledging harm. What specific harm, rupture, or imbalance does this research seek to heal? Is the intervention appropriate for addressing this? Remember that harm is not limited to humans; and many wounds are collective, not individual.

2.  Does this research seek to reform or reimagine? Some repairs reinforce the status quo; others create new possibilities. Does the project focus more on addressing the systemic causes of the issue I’m addressing, or more on mitigating the impacts of those causes in the existing system? Both are important, but how can I tell the difference, and how can I ensure that it is also clear for others?

3.  What collaborations would be required for genuine repair? Whose participation is necessary? Whose consent is required? Do we have these relationships, or do we need to build them? Are collaborators participating in all or some of the research (design, data collection, analysis, knowledge mobilization)? How will labour be compensated and credited? Remember the more-than-human collaborators, too.

4.  What emotional labor is required for this repair? Reparative work is not just intellectual or structural—it is also affective. What and whose fears, griefs, or discomforts must be engaged for real repair to happen? Whose work it is to engage these? What emotional labor has this research not yet accounted for?

5.  How can we help ensure our research is accountable without feigning innocence? Searching for innocence and purity often results in a denial of complicity. How can we seek to enact repair while knowing that we, and the institutions we are part of, are also part of the problem?

6.  How can this research go beyond tokenistic and performative gestures of repair? Committing to repair is not the same as actually enacting it in practice. How does this research intend to return resources, power, and/or decision-making to the most affected communities? How does it seek to tangibly shift extractive and unequal relational dynamics toward trust, respect, reciprocity, accountability and consent?

7.  Does this research treat repair as a process or a product? Does this research frame repair as a checklist or recognize it as emergent, adaptive, and relational? Have we accepted the possibility that this research might not result in the repair we seek, so that we don’t end up trying to force it? How is adaptability built into the research, so that it can shift as conditions and relations change?

8.  What assumptions does this research make about repair? If the research seeks to enact repair, what does it assume about what was broken, who did the breaking, and what repair looks like? What might change if rather than approaching harm as something to be “fixed”, it was something to compost—something that cannot be undone, but can be transformed into different conditions for what comes next?

9.  How can we avoid approaching repair in transactional ways? If repair becomes about “settling a score”, then it is likely to be enacted as an exchange: a reparative effort in exchange for absolution. How can we ensure our repair includes relational repair, which includes but also goes beyond material restitution for extracted resources and exploited labor, and interrupts transactional relational dynamics?

10.  How are funding decisions made within the project? How will resources be distributed across different collaborators? Does this distribution take into account uneven access to resources? Who has decision-making power over the project finances? Are there opportunities within the research design, implementation and/or knowledge mobilization to direct project resources to marginalized communities?

1.  What histories does this research carry? All fields of knowledge emerge from particular historical and cultural contexts—many of which are entangled with colonialism, capitalism, or exclusion. How does this research acknowledge or obscure its own lineage? What historical responsibilities does it have?

2.  How does this research distribute expertise? Does it treat certain voices as ‘experts’ while relegating others to the margins? How does it disrupt or reinforce existing hierarchies of knowledge? How does it seek to ensure collaborators with less systemic power are not only able to voice their perspectives (including critical concerns), but also have those perspectives heard by those on the project with more power?

3.  Who has already been engaged in this research? How does my project try to interrupt the assumption that academic researchers are the only (or primary) knowledge producers? How can we acknowledge and amplify the voices of those who have been engaged in reparative research and practice already – many of whom are the ones most directly affected by the problem this research seeks to address? 

4.  Who benefits from this research and who bears its costs? Why is this project important and for whom? Who gains power, resources, or recognition from this research? Who absorbs the risks or is left vulnerable? If the answer is uneven, could reparative adjustments be made or does the entire project need to be rethought? How am I benefitting from this research, and what responsibilities do I have as a result?

5.  What happens when this knowledge is set loose in the world? Once this research is published, who might use it? For what purposes? How will the research team be accountable to those who are most affected by the research, especially if it is misused or weaponized? 

6.  How can we discern the roles of different knowledge systems in repair? Some assert western knowledge cannot address the problems western knowledge created. Others assert the opposite: only western knowledge can address the problems that western knowledge created. How does the research consider both these perspectives and where they are coming from?

7.  How is this research accounting for institutionalized legacies of harm? New research is shaped by the knowledge it draws and builds on. Consider: In what ways has my field and my institution contributed to harm? In what ways have the harmful legacies of my field and my institution shaped this research project?

8.  What temporalities does this research reinforce? Some research is fueled by urgency and desires for immediate solutions, which can lead to rushed or extractive interventions. Does this work assume repair is about moving “forward” (and in a particular direction)? What would change if we moved at the speed of trust instead of an academic or funding deadline? How can we still do good work under time pressures? 

9.  How can we shift our research from ‘doing to’ to ‘being with’? Reparative research recognizes research as an ongoing entanglement—where what is studied is not only shaped by, but also shapes and implicates the researchers. Do the researchers frame themselves as independent agents, or do they acknowledge themselves as participants in relational dynamics of the research that are already in motion? 

10.  Do we know when to let research decompose? Research is rarely timeless. The implications of findings change over time, becoming less relevant or even dangerous. How can we identify the paradigms, theories, and even fields that need to rot? How can our research account for its own changing relevance and meaning over time? How can we be accountable in the long term—even after the project is over?

1.  Who is missing? Every study, model, or dataset includes choices about who/what is seen and who/what is erased. What perspectives, knowledge systems, or more-than-human intelligences are absent in this research? What shifts if they are included – in substantive rather than tokenistic ways? 

2.  How might this research change if future generations were watching? If those living 50 years from now were here, what would they say about our work? Would they see it as a gift, a burden, an apology? What might change about the research if their needs were centered? What is keeping this research from more fully accepting its intergenerational responsibilities (including to generations past, present, and future)? 

3.  What knowledges have been dismissed as unscientific or irrational – and why? Dominant knowledge systems often marginalize oral traditions, spiritual epistemologies, or ways of knowing deeply rooted in lived experience. What insights have been overlooked by our field because they do not fit within conventional academic research frames? How does our research relate to these other ways of knowing?

4.  What voices are present but not truly respected? If marginalized voices are included in this research, are they shaping the core questions and frameworks or are they just being cited as sources of raw data? Are different perspectives valued only as an epistemic asset or as an invitation into relational transformation? Who decides (e.g. where “forward” is, what the project should focus on, to what end)? 

5.  What would this research look like if the Earth had a seat at the table? If a river, soil, or wind were active participants in this study, how would the research change? What questions would they ask? What would this research look like if the Earth didn’t just contribute to it, but led the design of it?

6.  Is there space for the unknown – and the unknowable? Research is often motivated by the search for certainty and mastery, and the presumption that researchers are entitled to access all knowledges. How can we accept that not all knowledge will be shared with us – and we may not “understand” even that which is shared? What might happen if we made more space for the unknown and the unknowable? 

7.  How does/will this research navigate language and translation? Does this research assume dominant academic language is the default? How does it engage or neglect translation – not just linguistically, but culturally and contextually? What are the limits of translation – e.g. do we know how to ‘translate’ a tree?

8.  How does this research recognize and metabolize complicity? Reparative research needs to create space to hold the discomfort of complicity without immediately seeking absolution or action. How does this research move beyond a reactionary "guilt-to-action" impulse toward sustained accountability​?

9.  What aspects of repair are outside the scope of this research? No project can do everything. What parts of repair does this research engage well, and what aspects require other interventions? What would reparative research look like if it prioritized relationships rather than outcomes, and what are the barriers to enacting this approach?

10.  Are we accounting for complexities? How does this research take into account the multiple moving layers and complexities that go into creating the problem that the project seeks to address? How can we discern which of these layers to focus on (since it is impossible to focus on all of them at once)?

1.  What desires am I bringing to this research? Consistently revisiting one’s conscious and unconscious motivations can help ensure research does not further harm. What desires am I bringing to this research? How do my hopes for impact, recognition, or change shape what I am willing (or unwilling) to see? What personal, professional, or ideological investments do I have in this work? What risks come with these? 

2.  What assumptions shape this research? All research carries hidden assumptions about what is true, valuable, and possible. How might this work be implicitly recentering our own priorities and perspectives? What assumptions are embedded in this work? Who or what do these assumptions privilege? What would this research look like if different priorities, perspectives, and assumptions were centered? 

3.  How can I invite others into this process? Doing our own ‘homework’ and prep work is a priority, but our responsibility does not end there. How can I support my colleagues and students to ask these and similar questions with both compassion and accountability, and without asserting that I have it all ‘figured out’?

4.  How do I respond when challenged? How do I react when my intentions or actions are questioned or challenged by frontline communities (e.g. with humility, defensiveness, aggression, gratitude, or a combination)? How can I expand my emotional capacity to sit with discomfort, uncertainty, and complexity, and to learn from my mistakes, without retreating into defensiveness or withdrawal?

5.  How am I challenging my own presumed objectivity? Universities often train researchers to assume their knowledge is objective and universal. How might I be unconsciously operating in ways that presume my knowledge is universally relevant and exceptionally valuable (even if I have a stated critique of this)? How can I more explicitly acknowledge the situatedness and partiality of my knowledge system in my research?

6.  What if I was the object of study? What parts of myself (or my institution) am I still unwilling to place under scrutiny? How does this affect the research? Does this study ask participants, communities, or ecosystems to be vulnerable, transparent, or generous in ways I, as the researcher, am not?

7.  How am I part of the problem?  How has my discipline contributed to the problem this research seeks to address? How have I as an individual contributed to the problem we seek to address?

8.  How might this research assume a right to intervene? Even when aiming to disrupt colonial logics, academic researchers often implicitly claim the authority to "improve" a situation. Who has asked for this research? Who could refuse it? What would change if I assumed that I do not have the right to intervene?

9.  Am I doing this research to repair harm—or to repair my self-image? Academia rewards citations, publications, and recognition, even for reparative work. Is this research seeking meaningful change, or is it an attempt at absolving myself and asserting my own purpose, value, and exceptionalism? Is this work centering repair, or my authorship, redemption, and academic capital?

10.  What kind of preparation and support do we still need? Reparative research goes beyond mainstream research ethics training. What kind of support does the research team still need so that we can show up to do this work in ways that honour our relational responsibilities and that recognize and interrupt colonial patterns of relationship and knowledge production when they (almost inevitably) they appear?