ECRR builds on our expertise and the hard lessons learned in the Sex Work Activist Histories Project (SWAHP, Whore & Feminist) envisioning and collaborating to build an “ecosystem” that draws from the expertise of many to shape, influence, and create community-driven research and recordkeeping environments informed by social justice values and rich cross-community knowledges.

This interdisciplinary initiative creates research, policy recommendations, and practical methods training and programming for more deeply ethical social justice research created by, with, and for extremely marginalized and over-researched groups. We interrogate what ethical research looks like when it is driven by the concerns of social justice movements and the often-over-researched marginalized groups who make up these movements, rather than the interests of academic fields, institutions, and/or individual academic researchers. We want to understand how research, history-making, archival practices, policies, and systems must evolve when we require the meaningful involvement of marginalized communities in the research that most directly affects them.

We draw upon the metaphor of a natural ecosystem because it powerfully captures the inter-relationship between dynamic living organisms and the surrounding environment that both impacts and is impacted by that which is alive in a given environment.

In this social justice-oriented project, we envision that networks of community members, activists, archivists, and researchers working together comprise the delicate and dynamic living organisms of a social justice-oriented ecosystem. Other parts of the ecosystem–parts that are more entrenched/enmeshed within existing dominant power structures (such as hetero-patriarchy, settler-colonialism, or white supremacy) – include institutional policies (at universities, museums, libraries, and archives, for example), research methods and methodologies, funding paradigms and structures, research ethics review practices, belief systems about community-driven research, archival policies and practices, technology programs and applications, data regimes, and a whole host of other structures and infrastructures that shape and constrain folks operating within research and recordkeeping contexts. All aspects of the ecosystems we envision to be responsive to and supportive of one another in order for the system to sustain life, and to push toward social justice ends.

Understanding and then influencing how all elements of the ecosystem interact with and shape each other within community and recordkeeping ecosystems is a goal of this project. Building networks and strategies that influence ecosystems towards social justice is also at the heart of our project. 

The ecosystem metaphor is not ours alone; we are building on drug-user researchers Caty Simon, Sarah Brothers, Knina Strichartz, Abby Coulter , Nick Voyles , Anna Herdlein, and Louise Vincent’s (We are the researched, the researchers, and the discounted: The experiences of drug user activists as researchers, 2021) discussion of how stakeholder communities can be more meaningfully involved in the research that affects their lives: 

“Ideally, we envision a collaborative ecosystem of research efforts led by impacted communities, in which all parties benefit and help each other achieve substantive change. We aspire to be full participants in the research process by shaping the research design and ensuring that the research questions address the problems that we face.” (p.3)

We also love how Black activist adrienne maree brown engages with the concept of  ecosystem in her 2017 book Emergent strategy: Shaping change,changing worlds.

“But emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as part of the universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.” (p.3)