The study community of The Healing Project
Praxis Lab is being cultivated as a collaborative research and scholarly community directed by Dr. Dora N. Watkins within The Healing Project.
Here, research begins not simply with what we want to study, but with curiosity about what we think we know, how we have come to know it, and what else might become possible through inquiry.
We gather around the questions that become inconvenient once you start taking them seriously.
The word lab carries its own history. Particularly around concepts of experimentation, observation, control, replication, expertise, the subject/object binary. It can suggest a space where the researcher manipulates conditions in order to produce knowledge about something or someone else. That is not incidental to the name. It is part of what makes the name interesting to us.
What might a Black feminist "lab" become if the experiment is not performed on people but alongside people and on the arrangements through which we have learned to know? What if the thing under examination is sometimes the method, the construct, the researcher's certainty, the boundary between theory and story, the authority of the discipline, or the question itself?
We do not yet know whether Praxis Lab will remain the name, but for now, we like the tension. A lab where we are willing to place our own ways of knowing under critical and serious examination.
We study alongside the larger intellectual life of The Healing Project. Some questions currently moving through the space include:
These questions are not static and often change, as they should in a living intellectual community.
Praxis is often translated too easily as the application of theory to practice. That is not quite enough for what we want this space to become. Praxis, here, names a recursive intellectual life.
Sometimes, that looks like reading, rereading, and something becoming unstable. Or entering relationship and realizing our original question(s) carried assumptions we could not see alone. It might look like acting and the world answering back. It is a cadence of humility, patience, revision, and return.
We think. We encounter. We make. We try something. We notice what resists us. We discover that the theory does not quite hold, or that the question was carrying more than we knew. We return to the text, the story, the people, the work, ourselves. And not to begin again from the same place.
Praxis asks us to be changed by what we encounter. Theory does not sit without risk above the world waiting to be applied to it, and practice is not simply the place where theory proves itself effective or accurate. Each can interrupt the other and relationship can interrupt both. And sometimes what emerges from that movement is not an answer at all, but a better question, a different way of seeing, or the recognition that something we thought we knew needs to be unlearned.
Praxis Lab is being cultivated as intentionally small and developmental. We are building a scholarly community where people can bring unfinished ideas, encounter unfamiliar methods, read closely, ask difficult questions, create, write, revise, and learn alongside one another.
Depending on the project and stage of study, participation may include:
• independent study
• faculty-led research projects
• doctoral collaboration
• research and methodological training
• collaborative reading and conceptual inquiry
• analysis and writing groups
• conference presentations
• student-developed research questions
• creative and arts-informed inquiry
Not everyone in the Lab does the same work. Participation is shaped by intellectual fit, experience, learning goals, project needs, and available mentorship capacity.
You may be a good fit for Praxis Lab if you find yourself carrying a question you cannot quite put down. You might be wondering about resilience or healing. You might be interested in Black feminist epistemology, research methodology, art and knowledge, social work education, narrative, embodiment, or how communities make meaning. Or your question may sit somewhere we have not yet named.
You do not need to arrive with a fully formed research agenda or one that perfectly aligns with the overarching interest of THP. You just need curiosity, intellectual generosity, and a willingness to read again, think again, and look again.
You may be carrying a problem from class, something your field/discipline treats as settled that does not feel settled to you, an experience you cannot reconcile with the literature, a methodological frustration, an artistic question, a contradiction, a theory you cannot stop arguing with, or a question you cannot quite put down. Bring that.
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