The collaborative research community for research, inquiry, & scholarly development.
Praxis Lab is a collaborative research and scholarly community directed by Dr. Dora N. Watkins within The Healing Project. We bring students and scholars together around questions of resilience, strength, knowledge, relationship, creativity, healing, and possibilities beyond survival.
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.
How have resilience, strength, adaptation, protection, and flourishing been constructed, measured, lived, and contested, particularly within lives and communities historically relegated to the margins and historically required to survive?
Current inquiry: resilience measurement, critical construct validity, protective-factor discourse, Blackwomen's theorization of resilience, strength, resistance and refusal, and possibilities beyond survival.
How do the relational, environmental, creative, embodied, and epistemic conditions of inquiry shape what becomes possible to know?
Current inquiry: continued development of RARE Spaces, environmental bravery, epistemic environments, Black feminist approaches to rigor, participatory inquiry, and critical qualitative methodology.
What becomes knowable through relationship, dialogue, creative expression, embodiment, artistic encounter, and collective inquiry?
Emerging inquiry: Critical Dialogic Communities, expressive arts, relational knowledge production, artistic encounter, embodied experience, and relational community engagement.
For us, praxis is not simply the application of theory to practice. It names an ongoing relationship among reflection, knowledge, action, creation, and transformation.
We study ideas seriously and ethically, and we also ask what those ideas do: what they reveal, what they obscure, whose lives they help us understand, whose knowledge they authorize, and what possibilities they make imaginable.
Praxis means allowing inquiry to change not only what we know, but how we ask, how we relate, how we create, and what we understand ourselves to be responsible for doing with what we learn.
Praxis Lab is 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.
Lab gatherings create space for works-in-progress, methodological experimentation, collective reading, research questions, and scholarly conversation. Rather than functioning primarily as project-status meetings, gatherings are places to think together.
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.
Independent studies are individualized learning experiences developed around a focused question at the intersection of a student's interests and Dr. Watkins's areas of scholarship.
An independent study may involve sustained reading, conceptual analysis, methodological study, a critical literature review, development of a research question, arts-informed inquiry, or participation in a clearly defined component of an existing project.
Independent study is first and foremost an educational relationship and it is not unpaid research employment.
Students newer to research may begin by learning how to read scholarship critically, build a literature base, trace a construct or concept, develop research questions, engage methodological approaches, or contribute to a bounded research project.
Doctoral students may engage at deeper levels of conceptual development, methodological inquiry, analysis, writing, collaborative scholarship, and scholarly mentorship while continuing to develop research questions and intellectual identities of their own.
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