The Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) is an interdisciplinary natural and social science lab space dedicated to good land relations at Memorial University, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. CLEAR is a feminist, anti-colonial laboratory, which means their methods foreground values of humility, equity, and good land relations. Equal parts research space, methods incubator, and social collective, CLEAR’s ways of working, from their approach to environmental monitoring of plastic pollution to how they run lab meetings are based on values of humility, accountability, and anti-colonial research relations. As a natural science lab, CLEAR specialises in community-based monitoring of plastic pollution particularly in wild food webs. Equally important to their mission, they aim to “do research differently” through the creation and use of anti-colonial research methodologies.
Working with communities is at the core of the lab’s vision and mission. For the first few years after their founding in 2015, they worked to gain the trust of local communities and government leaders to be invited to do research on indigenous land in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, where they now work in collaboration with the Nunatsiavut Government. Their deeply place-based and relational approach is centered on developing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with the communities they work with, defining together the “metrics of science” chosen.
CLEAR’s work predominantly involves the monitoring of plastics, particularly in ocean-based food systems. It conducts beach and surface water surveys and analyses the gastro-intestinal tracts of fish and seabirds to assess plastic ingestion. The lab’s work directly impacts and informs communities, including related to the ingestion of plastics by marine animals destined for human consumption.
In their day-to-day work, lab researchers and researchers collaborate closely. But, CLEAR staff are careful to point out, this equity-based approach doesn’t equate to equality, but rather to complementarity in skills and knowledge. They are critical of what they see as the current fetishizing of the concept of community engagement , which they argue can disguise the real dynamics at play. As a CLEAR leader explained,
“The academic always has more power, no matter what but if the infrastructure ensures that the research is truly community-led, then the power can shift.”
Rather than involving communities in some steps of the research continuum only, CLEAR supports communities to decide themselves which studies should be undertaken and facilitates collaboration in all the phases of the research continuum. CLEAR begins a research collaboration with Nunatsiavut People by co-creating research questions. Then they hire local co-researchers (who are paid by CLEAR), and bring their own knowledge and expertise. In the research implementation, it means that the researchers will always work with an Indigenous co-researcher.
“We decide everything together. She gets veto authority in all decisions.”
CLEAR supports their research projects financially, and designs their project budgets to ensure that research equipment is provided to the community and stays with them, enabling them to lead future projects on their own. In an effort to democratise research, CLEAR has also developed low cost and low-tech instruments for surface water plastic collection such as the LADI (Low-tech Aquatic Debris Instrument) and the BabyLegs (made from baby stockings), which cost a fraction of the cost of standards instruments but are just as efficient. The design and user guides for these instruments are open source and meant to be built on site by communities and researchers who can’t afford standard instruments. Their goal is to ensure that communities don’t need researchers to carry on future research.
Once samples have been processed and data analysed, CLEAR begins a community peer review/participatory analysis process, which involves the co-researchers presenting findings and seeking inputs about next steps in their own community. Key to the process is a fundamental understanding that the community owns and controls the data and its use.
CLEAR and its Nunatsiavut partners’ mutual engagement supports capacity sharing (rather than capacity building) and impacts how research is conducted. The collaborative approach upholds community rights, but also their responsibility for the research process and outcomes.
They also apply a values-driven approach to all their lab activities, which starts from an assumption that all research decisions are political. The main techniques and tools used for meaningful leadership of communities and anti-colonial science include guidelines that provide ethical guidance to researchers working with indigenous groups, community peer review tools and methodologies to help secure communities’ right to self-representation, indigenous data sovereignty contracts that ensure that the communities involved owns and control the data throughout the research process, and publication guidelines that call for equity in authors order.
CLEAR has successfully developed and implemented a model for lab work that is genuinely place-based and collaborative. Being able to work in a truly collaborative manner took time, developing relationships of trust with local authorities, and “a lot of mistakes,” as a senior CLEAR staff member put it. They uphold this place-based approach as the only way to work meaningfully with communities.
Another key success of the lab is their practice of making their relationships, accountabilities, and anti-colonial practices visible through ongoing documentation of their research processes. This has enabled them to share their approaches more widely, become a best-practice model for feminist and anti-colonial science
Despite the focus on capacity sharing and community-led research, the vision and strategic direction for the Centre seem to be primarily set by the lab Director, which could make sustainability and replication potentially challenging.
While being based at a University, the lab is implementing an openly critical approach that interrogates the University’s systems, institutions, and research practices, working to transform them through advocacy and policy reform at the institutional level as well as through their own everyday practices. In this context, they position themselves as “grifters,” as a senior staff member put it, “appearing to belong enough that we can steer resources.” The lab operates according to a very pragmatic and effective approach to structural change. As a senior staff member explained, “our theory of change is infrastructural. It's not about hearts and minds or changing awareness, but rather about changing infrastructures and protocols.”
CLEAR is also embedded within a broader network of equally radical laboratories and research groups, who are working together to transform the research ecosystem from within. For these researchers, most contemporary science is colonial, especially in the environmental field, and must be transformed fundamentally.