Our Goals and Visionary Pursuits
Mission and Vision: The Center for Coalitional Praxis and Liberation is a collaborative research lab for students, faculty, and community members that foregrounds dynamic communication processes as foundational to the liberation of oppressed, colonized, exploited, and racialized peoples and communities across the globe.
We welcome Communication Studies scholars and students of all methods and sub-fields, as well as scholars of other disciplines across UNL, committed to or curious about building (transnational) solidarity, fostering coalitions, and advancing communication theorizing and practices toward liberatory ends.
We also welcome collaboration with community organizations, social movements, activists, artists, storytellers, researchers, teachers, and policymakers oriented toward developing participatory and transformative interventions that serve the needs and liberatory aspirations of those living at the margins.
Our approach is grounded in intersectional coalitional praxis,
and our goals pursue liberation beyond the normative frameworks of social justice.
Coalitional Praxis
We understand coalitional praxis as a community-based transformative communication process through which unity across difference can be realized, self-determination can be nurtured, and the implementation of liberatory and just futures can come to fruition.
In sum, coalitional praxis is the communicative process through which people get to decide who they are to one another, together, at the edge of each other’s battles.
Transforming the “Research Lab”
Rethinking the Lab Structure.
CCPL challenges the dominant lab structure that valorizes hierarchy and perpetuates colonial relations and ideologies. We are committed to devaluing these hierarchical frameworks and disinvesting from institutional power structures that contribute to the very problems we are trying to eliminate.
Reimagining Possibilities through Relationality.
We seek to disrupt these traditional structures by creating relationalities of reciprocity and responsibility that strengthen our interconnectedness and interdependencies and help us to illuminate new, vibrant pathways for realizing liberatory futures.
Adapting to Emergent Issues.
Because the CCPL’s foundation emerges from shared principles rather than fidelity to a specific methodology or topical area, the lab is well suited for addressing pressing social issues as they emerge, rather than predetermining
emphasis areas.
Shared Principles: Justice, Stewardship, and Community
Justice-Based Knowledge Production.
The development of research that facilitates theemergence of boundless forms of community and being together.
Knowledge Stewardship.
Knowledge stewards treat data and knowledge as relatives worthy of care, respect, and protection, and aim to promote sustainable research practices that honor these relationships and the responsible management of natural and cultural resources. CCPL prioritizes interdisciplinary research and is critically attuned to the potential uses and misuses of knowledge in North American academia.
Building Community.
A willingness to work across varying Communication sub-fields and methodologies, while maintaining an awareness of the uses and misuses of the institutionalization of knowledge.