Guiding Principles

The 2023-28 Strategic Research Plan is shaped by the substantial challenges that touch every part of our cultural, social, ecological, political, economic, and infrastructural systems.

From the global pandemic to the climate crisis to the ongoing impacts of colonialism, systemic racism, and gender discrimination, it is essential for ECU to set strategic commitments and guiding principles that can help to deliver meaningful engagement across research, knowledge dissemination, and training.

Our guiding principles will inform the way our academic community works together through collaboration and care to ensure the next stage of research at ECU builds more diverse, dynamic, and transformative opportunities for excellence across art, media, and design practices.

To this end, research at ECU will explore some of society's most pressing questions and challenges by centring the following Guiding Principles.

We work to advance equity, diversity and inclusion throughout our research and foster broader social transformation and change. We also recognize that success in research has long been centred around values, concerns, and priorities that do not reflect the diversity of our university and do not align with the research community we want to build.

As a result, our plan provides for more expansive and more diverse strategic and thematic focus areas that can catalyze new critical investigations into disciplines, fields, and canons that have historically and continually reinforce exclusion and marginalization.

By cultivating resources devoted to Indigenous methods and epistemologies, supporting researchers and students from equity-denied communities, and developing research that engages in transformative creative strategies that enact and support social justice and community wellness, we will ensure all members of our community can thrive in pursuing new, necessary, and transformative research.

Our work to remove the systemic barriers that prevent researchers who identify as women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, members of visible minorities/racialized groups, and members of LGBTQ2S+ communities will also continue with renewed focus.

We believe that Art and Design universities have a unique role in addressing the climate emergency, habitat loss, species extinction and other urgencies brought about by anthropogenic forces.

Our plan identifies environmental sustainability, ecological justice, and climate action as key priorities to ensure our work critically examines methods and practices that continue to exploit nonhuman entities and reinforce climate injustice experienced by equity-denied communities while developing decolonial practices that engage with care-of-the-world methodologies and the envisioning of non-human ways of knowing as contributions to research and creativity.

We see critical and creative practices as means of ‘worldmaking’, where a diverse range of creators can impact urgent social, cultural, and political issues.

Our researchers deploy art, media, and design practices to engage across diverse fields of knowledge and understandings and our plan is dedicated to supporting our community’s capacity to engage in art, media, and design practices that integrate into daily life – from galvanizing open participation in unprecedented ways, to offering instances of emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic resonance and connection, to solving real-world problems through new forms of practice.

We value collaboration as a goal and method. Our plan points to ways that research can connect to emerging communities of practice, creating new platforms and clusters, and dissemination opportunities.

Research also connects us with community engagement and partnerships, co-op and internship programs, industry-partnered projects, and collaborations both within and outside of the university.

We create robust support systems for grant writing, funding, and resource acquisition that will help to enact our plan. We make available a locally hosted repository for research outcomes, ensuring access and discoverability, providing long-term preservation and digital object identifier (DOI) minting, and a way to fulfill Tri-Agency requirements of open scholarship.

In order to make research data open and accessible, the ECU Library, in collaboration with the Research and Industry Office, provides education and guidance for research data management best practices and OCAP principles.

We ensure reciprocity is built into our work, where art, media, and design practitioners and researchers generate knowledge through making-led research and practices that support important creative experimentation and transformative outcomes that connect to the communities extending beyond our institution and the land on which we work.

To practice reciprocity, the insights, experience, and research that comes out of communities need to be offered back to those communities.

Our plan underscores the need for researchers to be not merely experts in their field, but to also have a responsibility to connect, share and learn from a variety of publics and communities.