Lab Manual

 

  • Welcome to the Digital Apothecary! We are excited that you are joining this lab, which aims to create solutions and salves for the digital ailments we face as a society. The Digital Apothecary is a hybrid digital and physical lab dedicated to combining ancient and new technologies in an effort to produce processes and projects that aid those most marginalized in society.

    It is a place for applied research that goes beyond theory.

    Land & Labor Acknowledgement

    Before going into more details about the lab, we want to acknowledge that Northwestern and our lab, the Digital Apothecary, is a community of learners situated within a network of historical and contemporary relationships with Native American tribes, communities, parents, students, and alumni. It is also in close proximity to an urban Native American community in Chicago and near several tribes in the Midwest. The Northwestern campus sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations. It was also a site of trade, travel, gathering and healing for more than a dozen other Native tribes and is still home to over 100,000 tribal members in the state of Illinois. We also recognize that land acknowledgements are not enough. Read more about our efforts to get Northwestern to pay a land tax to the council of the three fires and the lab’s commitment to do the same.

    In addition to acknowledging the land that the lab occupies, we work to make sure our research also supports the descendents of those whose enslaved labor made this space possible. This lab also acknowledges the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendents, Black Chicagoans like the “founder of Chicago” Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable and Evanstonians, who have enriched this region with cultural and economic contributions that can never be truly quantified.

  • The Digital Apothecary values...

    Process over Product - In the Digital Apothecary, we are more concerned with the day to day workflows of the lab than what they generate. We want to cultivate a lab culture that is built with intention and where process takes precedence over what is produced. We value our everyday practice of our principles.

    People over Publications - We strive to cultivate relationships within the lab, the greater Northwestern community, and the Chicagoland area that are sustaining and mutually beneficial. We will work with community members to create publications or other outputs but not at the expense of these relationships. Our goal is to nurture community and lab relationships in a way that outlives any particular project or goal.

    Accessing Accessibility - We commit to imagining and implementing a lab model that is accessible to (1) all lab members and (2) communities to whom our work can serve as a resource.

    Our principles are...

    Collaboration & Discourse - We foster a culture where we can receive regular feedback from our peers and mentors on the projects we are working either in the form of a weekly or biweekly seminar or workshop

    Slow Work - We approach our work through the ethics of pace. This means engaging in sustainable work routines, limiting lab waste, and practicing mindfulness.

  • The Digital Apothecary takes mentorship seriously and understands it to be a dynamic process. What follows are expectations for the mentor/mentee relationship.

    The current lab members have created a template to be filled out for thinking about mentorship and the relationship between you and your mentor. For example, you want to think about what you as a graduate student might need from your faculty mentor? How much do you think you need to meet? What do you typically expect in terms of responsiveness from your mentor? Also it is helpful to think about what your mentor can expect from you. How communicative will you be? How do you plan to engage with the work of the lab?

    Lastly, even if you are still unsure about what job you would like in the future, try to write an imaginative paragraph about post grad school life. What is the work that would make you happy? This can be helpful in letting your mentor know what opportunities to look out for to help you and what steps you might need to take to get to your ideal post grad school life.

    Mentoring Relationship Template:

    What I would like to expect from my mentor:

    What my mentor can expect from me:

    An imaginative paragraph about your ideal post grad school job:

    ——

    If you are interested in the Digital Apothecary’s mentorship opportunities, get involved here

  • Two of our aforementioned lab values articulate our commitment to working with and for the communities in which our lab grows:

    People over Publications - We strive to cultivate relationships within the lab, the greater Northwestern community, and Chicagoland area that are sustaining and mutually beneficial. We will work with community members to create publications or other outputs but not at the expense of these relationships. Our goal is to nurture community and lab relationships in a way that outlives any particular project or goal.

    Accessing Accessibility - We commit to imagining and implementing a lab model that is accessible to (1) all lab members and (2) communities to whom our work can serve as a resource.

    The task of efficiently turning academic research knowledge into actionable community knowledge remains difficult, but a myriad of efforts by critical and activist scholars have informed our own approach to implementing these values. For further learning, we recommend:

    Doing Community-Based Participatory Research

    Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is “an approach to research that involves collective, reflective and systematic inquiry in which researchers and community stakeholders engage as equal partners in all steps of the research process with the goals of educating, improving practice or bringing about social change.”

    Interested in Partnering with the Digital Apothecary?

    We are always open to forming new connections with organizations within our community. If you are interested in partnering with us, please submit information on your organization and ideas at the following link:

    Community Partner Interest Form

  • For further reading, check out the footnotes linked here, and/or look over the Key Equity Terms and Concepts: A Glossary for Shared Understanding

    Misogynoir:

    Misogynoir, a term coined by Dr. Bailey, “describes the uniquely co-constitutive racialized and sexist violence that befalls Black women as a result of their simultaneous and interlocking oppression at the intersection of racial and gender marginalization.” It describes the “anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”

    Digital Alchemy:

    The ways in which social media users, particularly women of color, use social media platforms for social justice ends and imagine these platforms beyond what the original creators might have intended. It is how these users are creating what they need from the tools that are given to them, whether for movement building, organizing, or other ways they use these platforms to meet their needs.

    Digital Apothecary:

    This is the name of our lab, and refers to our work in thinking about making social justice salves for the digital and using the digital to make salves for social justice. While the digital can be a place that can be transformative and imaginative, it can also be its own poison and toxin that we might need relief from.

    Intersectionality:

    Coined by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, this term describes the ways in which race, class, gender, and other aspects of our identity “intersect” with one another. Intersectionality can be a framework for understanding how “individuals simultaneously experience oppression and privilege in their daily lives interpersonally and systemically.”

    Social Justice:

    “A process, not an outcome, which (1) seeks fair (re)distribution of resources, opportunities, and responsibilities; (2) challenges the roots of oppression and injustice; (3) empowers all people to exercise self-determination and realize their full potential; (4) and builds social solidarity and community capacity for collaborative action.”

    Reparative Justice:

    “Reparative Justice is a way of thinking about justice (a mindset) that centers those who have been harmed, and focuses on repairing past harms, stopping present harm, and preventing the reproduction of harm.”

    Transformative Justice:

    Transformative justice seeks to “create responses to violence that do what criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again” (p. 59) Engaging with transformative justice means providing “people who experience violence with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities.

    Equality vs Equity:

    These 2 concepts are not the same. While equality means treating everyone exactly the same, equity is attuned to the differential social, economic, cultural, and political positions people are in and is about addressing the power relations that lead to this unevenness.

    To view these definitions with the complete citations, please click here

  • We are a lab dedicated to social, transformative, and reparative justice. Therefore, we refuse to accept funding from institutions, organizations, corporations that endorse or promote violence (e.g. U.S. Department of Defense and US military), inequitable labor practices (e.g. Amazon), and political agenda that go against our lab mission to produce processes and projects that aid those most marginalized in society.

    One of the core values of our lab is process over product. Instead of using the funding we receive as a one-time payment with no lasting impact on recipients, we will use the resources we have raised to build sustainable relationships with individuals and communities we collaborate with (e.g. guest speakers, event partners, research participants, informants).

    We are also committed to building and creating tools and practices that facilitate faster and direct compensation to speakers, artists, and activists. Through Honor, we aim to promote more equitable compensation practices within higher education.

    A little bit more about Honor is available here.

  • While our lab emphasizes the process of collaboration over research productivity, we also value publication as a means of disseminating our work to academic and non-academic communities, through mediums including academic journals and op-eds.

    Science and Health Journal Articles

    • Recent studies have demonstrated a critical need for more evidence-based scientific knowledge on racism and health. A 2021 literature review by Krieger et al. analyzed papers including the word “racism” published in four leading medical journals, the American Journal of Public Health, and the Annual Reviews series for four disciplines (psychology, sociology, public health and medicine) between 1990-2020. While published articles including the term “racism” skyrocketed in 2020, prior to 2020, “…the numbers were relatively low and unchanged for NEJM, JAMA, and The Lancet; increased then fell for BMJ; and showed a clear trend of consistently increasing for AJPH” (Krieger et al). This lack of publications has a number of potential negative impacts, including conveying that racism is an unimportant object of scientific study, perpetuating ignorance among healthcare providers, limiting the evidence available to support equitable health policy, and harming the careers of researchers who study racism and health by keeping valuable research out of high-impact journals (Krieger et al).

    Op-Eds