Researching as One Community
Learn more about our Challenge Lab funding opportunities for collaborative research where students and staff work together as co-researchers.
What are Challenge Labs?
The HASS Faculty Research Institutes for Creative Arts Practice, Humanities and Social Science play a key role as connectors and incubators. We help to create spaces for experimentation and innovation that connect university members and partners from across the faculty, the wider university, and our communities beyond. Together, we aim to nurture emerging and engaged interdisciplinary collaborations that have the potential to address some of society's most pressing challenges in all their complexity. A vital part of this work focuses on our integrated culture of research and education that is fully inclusive of our UG and PG student co-researchers and all Newcastle University colleagues. The Faculty Research Institutes embrace the values of equality, diversity, inclusion, allyship and intergenerational equity, and are committed to promoting a culture of open and participatory research. Challenge Labs are a key part of our work to envision the university of the future. Over the past two years, Challenge Labs have created a space to incubate and experiment with new ways of working that are fully inclusive of all members of the university.
Challenge Labs are dynamic, flexible, interdisciplinary and intergenerational spaces that invite any member of the university to participate in a collaborative research project. They engage the arts, humanities and social sciences, alongside disciplines in our other two faculties, in research projects that address the world's most pressing and complex issues. These are problems that cannot be adequately addressed from the perspective of a single discipline, or indeed from a single location; instead, they require the careful task of building conceptual and methodological coalitions between multiple disciplines in order to fully illuminate and transform our collective appreciation of a common challenge.
Challenge Labs work with an expanded definition of the term 'research' as they strengthen a research pathway, supported by an inclusive culture of scholarship, through Newcastle University from undergraduate stage one to alumni and members of the retired staff association (NURSA). They aim to demystify research as not only the domain of the experienced scholar, but equally as an activity that belongs to everyday life and work. This way, they support curiosity, critical and creative thinking as life skills and trace pathways that lead into research beyond academia.
Challenge Labs are not intended to be output driven in a linear sense, at the expense of a properly rounded and paced exploratory process. They do, however, generate unexpected and rewarding creations. Challenge Labs are creative and critical, critically engaging to creatively re-imagine. They challenge ways of perceiving and understanding, adopting an approach that works ex-negativo to encourage participants to focus on what they are trained not to see.
Challenge Labs enable and support spaces that are:
Collaborative
Challenge Labs connect people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to work together, despite sharing a common problem or challenge. They explore how different approaches can interact with one another to become greater than the sum of their parts to respond to society's most pressing challenges in all their complexity. As the funding landscape shifts from the lone-scholar format to larger collaborative streams, Challenge Labs enable us to join the dots back through all stages of our institutional activities to embed collaborative, interdisciplinary ways of working from undergraduate. The collaborative aspect of the Challenge Labs also prepares students for group assessment exercises that are often a key part of recruitment processes.
Inclusive
Challenge Labs promote institutional cohesion by fostering a shared culture of enquiry. We strive to create a comfortable, unintimidating and inclusive space for students to feel supported, and empowered with the confidence, to ask the questions that matter to them most. The community that is strengthened through the Challenge Labs is shaped by intergenerational equity, equality, diversity, inclusivity and allyship.
Engaged
By addressing society’s most pressing challenges, Challenge Labs might offer a 'real-world' alternative to the dissertation. This offers a format that can also benefit external, 'real world' collaborators, giving them risk-free, facilitated access to people who are seeking to address the same challenges as them. Working with such external collaborators, students become better prepared for the world of research-based employment.
Interdisciplinary
For students and staff, this offers an opportunity to situate their understanding of disciplinary training. Challenge Labs are not designed to replace the disciplinary-based learning of our degree programmes. In contrast, they offer a relational perspective on the intrinsic value and focus of disciplinary-based training. Challenge Labs illuminate what our disciplines teach us to focus on. As they do so, they also reflect on what they train us not to see, recognising that the boundaries established between disciplines are exclusive. The latter is important as it acts as a leveller within the group—everyone is out of their comfort zone. Decolonising (a keystone of our commitment to global equity and accountability) means de-disciplining and actively understanding the historical and (geo)political agendas that were established and have been served by the disciplinary way of carving up knowledge. Hence, Challenge Labs approach knowledge as a continuum, or a spectrum, rather than a set of siloes.
Innovative
Challenge Labs aim to innovate by experimenting with interdisciplinary methods and pedagogies that benefit from novel interactions at the education/research nexus. They embed a culture of curiosity and exploration, without fear of failure or the unknown, and build an intergenerational community around these values. We hope to create a space for social and institutional innovation that is not top-down, a space to help us better understand contemporary and future literacies that will be vital to imagining the higher education curriculum of the future.
What form does a challenge lab take?
There is no prescribed format for Challenge Labs. Some take place within an afternoon; others take place over a semester. Their individual format is shaped by the specific conundrum being addressed, the particular group of co-researchers participating, and the facilitators helping to guide each Challenge Lab.
Inspired?
Inspired by the prospect of a challenge lab please read more about our current offerings or register interest in creating your own. Still looking for inspiration? Please read more about our previous Challenge Labs fellows. Including one of our previous winners, Philippa Carter, who has wrote a very interesting blog about the impact of her project.
Meet our Student Researchers
Challenge Labs allowed me to explore an interdisciplinary way of approaching a topic in a supportive environment with access to the funds needed to make the project a reality. The whole experience was great and hugely enjoyable!
Our student intern was amazing! Her web development, design skills, and curatorial ideas have been central to the project, and she has been a committed, enthusiastic, and invaluable member of the research team.