RARE Spaces is a critical methodological framework developed by Dr. Dora N. Watkins (2025) for cultivating the relational and environmental conditions through which rigorous, situated, and deeply human knowledge can emerge.
Grounded in Black feminist epistemology and developed through participatory, arts-informed research with differently situated Blackwomen, RARE Spaces takes seriously a deceptively simple proposition: where and how knowledge is produced matters to what can become known.
The framework attends to power, relationship, lived experience, creative expression, accountability, and the research environment itself, asking what becomes possible when people historically positioned as objects of knowledge are engaged as theorists and knowledge producers.
Research does not happen in neutral space.
What people are willing or able to say, question, remember, create, withhold, contest, and theorize is shaped by the conditions in which inquiry takes place. Power, histories, bodies and relationships enter the room. And so do risk, trust, contradiction, silence, creativity, and the expectations people carry about whose knowledge will ultimately matter.
RARE Spaces emerged from a concern with these conditions.
Rather than treating the research environment as a passive container for data collection, the framework understands environment as consequential to knowledge production itself.
RARE Spaces emerged through Dr. Watkins's dissertation research, RARE Spaces for Strong Stories and Healing Justice: A Critical Genealogy of Resilience Among Blackwomen in a U.S. Context (2025).
Working alongside a Critical Participatory Action Research group of six differently situated Black women, the study used testimonios, arts-informed story circles, and critical narrative analysis to interrogate how resilience has been constructed, lived, contested, and understood.
RARE Spaces developed within that inquiry as both a methodological commitment and an attention to the conditions necessary for participants to engage complexity, story, contradiction, creativity, and critical meaning-making.
What began within a particular study is now being further theorized as a critical methodological framework.
Radical asks us to go to the root.
Inquiry cannot detach people's experiences from the historical, political, cultural, and structural conditions through which those experiences become possible. Radical practice asks researchers to interrogate power, including the power embedded within research itself.
Authentic attends to the conditions under which complexity can remain present.
People are contradictory, situated, changing, and differently positioned. Authenticity within RARE does not presume a singular “true self.” It asks whether inquiry permits people to name, revise, complicate, refuse, and theorize their experiences without requiring those experiences to conform neatly to researcher expectations.
Rigorous refuses the false choice between humanity and scholarly rigor.
RARE asks what disciplined, accountable inquiry requires when knowledge is understood as relational, situated, embodied, and shaped by power. Creative, participatory, and relational approaches do not suspend rigor; they require us to articulate rigor appropriate to the epistemological commitments of the work.
Environmentally Brave recognizes the environment as an active condition of knowledge production.
No research space can guarantee safety, particularly when inquiry engages histories of harm, structural inequity, identity, power, or vulnerability. RARE therefore shifts attention from promising safety to examining what researchers can responsibly cultivate: conditions for agency, critical engagement, relational accountability, meaningful choice, creative risk, refusal, and courageous inquiry.
Environmental bravery is not something demanded from participants. It is a responsibility carried by the research environment and those who help construct it.
Radical, Authentic, Rigorous, and Environmentally Brave are not sequential steps or conditions that can simply be checked off.
They function relationally.
A space cannot meaningfully invite authenticity without attending to power. Rigor cannot be separated from epistemological commitments. Environmental bravery cannot be created through rules alone. Radical inquiry requires attention to the relationships and conditions through which knowledge is being produced.
RARE therefore asks researchers to attend continuously to the ecology of inquiry rather than merely the mechanics of method.
Critical Participatory Action Research
How are power and epistemic authority negotiated?
Narrative and testimonio
What conditions allow complex stories to be told, withheld, revised, and interpreted?
Arts-informed and embodied inquiry
What conditions allow creative and embodied knowledge to emerge?
Learning environments
How might RARE inform inquiry into dialogic and relational knowledge-making?
Community-engaged scholarship
What does accountable knowledge production require across institutional/community relationships?
RARE Spaces emerged from a study interrogating resilience among Blackwomen, and that genealogy remains consequential.
If resilience has too often been defined from outside the lives of those required to enact it, then studying resilience differently requires more than asking different questions. It requires reconsidering the conditions under which knowledge about resilience is produced in the first place.
RARE Spaces responds to that methodological problem by asking how research environments might support people in theorizing their own experiences of strength, survival, resistance, healing, and possibilities beyond survival.
RARE Spaces is an evolving critical methodological framework. Its initial conceptualization emerged through Dr. Watkins's doctoral research and continues to develop through methodological scholarship, research, teaching, creative inquiry, and community-engaged praxis.
Current work examines the framework's theoretical foundations, methodological implications, and possibilities across research and learning environments.
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