Learning collectively

My approach to research is grounded in a philosophy of collective inquiry, one that values relational knowledge, co-emergence, and the unpredictable transformation that arises from being-with others in process. This ethic has been shaped by my student years and my involvement with the CRIC and CSCS at UQAM—spaces that foreground social experimentation, the politics of knowledge, and the agency of communities in shaping their own epistemologies. I carry this sensibility into all aspects of my work, insisting that research must not extract from community, but instead emerge from entangled, horizontal processes of reflection, action, and care.

This ethos also extends to my years of work in community organizations, where pedagogies of mutual aid, embodied learning, and situated knowledges have shaped the way I hold space. Whether through grassroots campaigns, facilitation, or event-building, I understand collective research as a commitment to think, imagine, and transform together.

In the last years, I have been involved with the End of the World Research, originally based in Montréal, emerged in 2023 of a question, shared between a set of young, interdisciplinary, and independent artists and researchers. “What happens to the Self at the End of the World?” going through ecological collapse, epistemological breakdown, and the end of dominant world-systems. Meeting weekly at Bibliothèque DIRA, Montréal’s anarchist library, we gathered in a spirit of radical co-creation and critical play. Our meetings unfolded on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg lands, in Tiohtià:ke (Mooniyang), and we acknowledged from the start that both our physical and online spaces were materially entangled with histories of extraction, resistance, and survival. Together, we tended a community garden at the anarchist library, hosted a solstice dinner to honor the rhythms of the seasons, and organized poster interventions across the city to anchor our digital Twine piece into physical space.

Emerging from these gatherings was a Twine-based interactive essay-poem-archive, published by Flat Journal (UCLA). This piece invites nonlinear exploration across radical ecology, queer theory, somatic inquiry, and collective imagination. My own contribution focused on a playful critical reflection of Heidegger’s Begriff and Lyotard’s notion of the end of grand narratives, proposing that critical philosophy must move beyond static critique—toward embodied, relational, and research-creation based modes of thinking-with the world.

Through these practices of learning with others, I explore how theoretical inquiry can overflow into lived, collective, and sensorial acts of becoming—engaging land, language, and more-than-human kinships beyond colonial and extractive epistemologies. Influenced by principles of emergent strategy, I focused on creating conditions for thought to take root beyond discussion—leading the group into small, situated actions that folded theory into practice.