A Dialogue on Humanizing Research Labs Across Graduate Students and Faculty

• In Event: Humanizing Research Labs: How Faculty Use Their Labs to Dismantle, Redesign, and Reconstruct Oppressive Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we use a politicized caring framework (McKinney de Royston et al., 2017) to reflect on key practices and collaborations that we argue supported a humanizing experience for graduate students in a research lab. In particular, we focus on how faculty intentionally worked on developing communal bonds and affirming students’ potential across three categories: (1) supporting students to prioritize their health as part of the human experience; (2) providing the mentorship students needed to learn the craft of humanizing research; and (3) creating opportunities for students to shift their participation over time.
Across all three categories, we found that faculty who engaged in humanizing students’ experiences involved labor that was often unrecognized and served to address structural shortcomings of the university. In the first, faculty supported students to prioritize health by learning about students’ lives in and out of academia, recognizing stressors, and offering solutions to minimize stress. We found that efforts to relieve students’ stress were not empty gestures and required faculty to commit their time and pedagogical care beyond what is typically expected, such as connecting students to resources or taking on previously assigned work. In the second, faculty provided mentorship that was humanizing and modeled how to extend that humanization to the research participants we studied and learned from. While university courses and Institutional Review Boards address related topics such as ethical research, we found that faculty addressed gaps that improved our relationships with research participants and our research, offering distinct paradigms for the “how” and “why” of relational, justice-oriented research (Patel, 2015). In the third, faculty created opportunities for students to shift their participation over time by recognizing students’ potential and providing the time and resources needed to cultivate it. With this approach, faculty foregrounded students’ learning and not deadlines. These personalized approaches took time and positioned students as full participants in different key areas necessary to be successful in academia—and to do the academy differently.
We present our findings as a dialogue between senior graduate students and faculty concerning how they experienced the three categories and how they worked to co-create the space. We also share the edges of our thinking about the tensions and challenges of building humanizing space within what are often dehumanizing institutions and consider the ongoing development of research labs organized around educational dignity (Espinoza et al., 2020).

Authors

• Ruben Echevarria, Valparaiso University

• Ava Jackson, Loyola University Chicago

• Paula K. Hooper, Northwestern University

• Shirin Vossoughi, Northwestern University