Ongoing Initiatives

The Pirate Guide is a grassroots wiki owned and edited by ComCult students for ComCult Students. Emerging from the Ad Hoc Graduate Committee on Accessibility, the Pirate Guide is a central pool of resources meant to demystify graduate studies for those with intersectional identities. The document seeks to address the systemic barriers of marginalized students, documenting our difficulties and successes for the purposes of solidarity and mutual aid. This process of demystification was determined to be an important aspect of horizontal solidarity and a means of increasing the accessibility of graduate education.

This is a living document, open to contributions and updates. The unofficial quality of this document enables students to share practical skills, tricks, and techniques for getting through the bureaucratic difficulties that come with working under an institutional framework.

Our approach to liberatory methods is to create community access through informal infrastructures enabling small acts of care to become mobilized into broader processes of solidarity. This form of praxis enables a piecework approach to community infrastructure, creating a commons that empowers individuals to work towards collective goals. This guide is a form of a praxis meant to level power and hierarchies in higher-education by collectivizing the means to academic success.

To get access to the guide, please submit a request or access the guide through the Discordant Communications Discord Server in #accommodations and support

Past Initiatives

The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Conference

The day opened with an extended land acknowledgment, attempting to remember all living thing past, present, and future existing in the location of the Daphne Cockwell Complex.

Our party-based event structure combined art making with conversation, all while mapping the dimensions of space-time. The party consisted of four sections: the point, the line, the space, and the time. We met together as a group at the beginning and the end of the celebration. Everyone was invited to change their positions or their point of view with the ringing of a bell. Each participant was invited to share their trajectory through the concepts at the end of the event.

Our focus was on gathering, and sharing knowledge while having fun and talking about our experiences.

Beyond Talk: (embodiment, relation, play)

The Relational Studio Collective

The relational studio collective hosted this embodied, process oriented workshop, inviting student to come play and give their brains (and research) a rest by reconnecting with their bodies. Grounded in participatory action research, performance ethnography, and participatory theatre, Kathy Porter led students in a series of embodied and creative techniques drawn from theatre, communication, and therapeutic knowledges.

Outsider Pedagogies:

Research-Creation for Social Change

SORCE members iowyth hezel ulthiin and Miranda McKee defined research-creation as a valuable methodology gaining momentum in qualitative research. Combining artistic and academic praxis, researchers use creative expression to investigate, co-create, develop and disseminate knowledge, ultimately challenging the limits of knowledge making itself.

This discussion explored the history of this approach, expanding upon its use-cases, strengths, and challenges. In particular, the panel wove together case studies with personal experience to discuss the potential power of research-creation as a vehicle for social change, building bridges between academia and the rest of the world.

We examined different modalities including counter-mapping as liberatory data activism, participatory theatre for policy change, outsider improv spaces as equitable praxis, and photography for climate activism. Embodied and aesthetic practices were explored as examples that seek to transform life itself through acts of being. The panel explored how creativity may serve as a conduit for public pedagogy, unleashing the power of seeing, feeling, and being as essential modes for living, learning, and continuance.

Debris Mapping Dunas

Artists and creative researchers Tricia Enns (Tioht:àke/Montréal) and Andrew Lochhead (Tkaronto/Toronto) led a two-hour workshop exploring walking and “map” making using debris and handmade paper techniques to explore issues of urban space, waste, memory and the politics of place through a participation-based approach.

Collecting debris while walking and learning the stories of what is now called Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Garrison Creek, and nearby Dundas Street, participants examined how discarded objects, like the land they are found on, connect to historic global trajectories of power that reverberate through our present day.

Set along Dundas Street West in Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Lochhead and Enns brout together their individual practices of scenographic walking, debris mapping and paper making to present a hybrid chorography (or place-writing) of spaces within Canada’s largest city, which continues to be the site of heated debate around public memory and civic belonging.

Parallaxes: UNCONFERENCE 2022

The 2022 Parallaxes Unconference was the inaugural SORCE experiment. Deconstructing traditional modes of scholarship and sharing to create a horizontal and inclusive space for mutual discovery, our mission for the unconference was to “ask better questions,” seeking to generate a group process of inquiry that would guide SORCE planning as well as how we structure and orient our inquiry into the future. Over 30 co-creative participants gathered for a full-day event where we shared our practices, generating ideas, and questions about the ways research-creation plays out in our own lives and areas of interest.

SORCE/CAMRA Roundtable

In December 10th, 2020, SORCE collective held a roundtable with CAMRA. An initiative from the University of Pennsylvania, SORCE and CAMRA were able to share reflections on research-creation drawing from members’ individual praxes and experiences.

Seven scholars from each university presented their work in a community-building exercise. Presentations were followed by a generative Q & A and conversation about the process of navigating art-based methodologies and departmental expectations within the Academy.

There were 14 presentations overall with a robust and participatory audience in attendance.