Reducing inequality and improving social justice are among the most urgent current societal challenges, embrace as a crucial task by institutions such as Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

This lab focuses on co-creative methodologies and attitudes to create inclusive knowledge and to enable a democratic form of knowledge production. The lab will promote and support research that centers the experiences of the people or communities that are generally objects of research, but that also connects with the professional knowledges and engages in a productive exchange between these knowledges (experiential, professional and academic knowledge). It is not possible to design either policy or research that truly contributes to a more just society, without a stronger connection with the lives and contexts of those experiencing unjust structures and without taking their knowledge as a serious point of departure.

Co-creation for inclusive knowledge means connecting and co-developing different types of knowledge in dialogue with each other, with a strong focus on the importance of experiential knowledge of exclusionary structures or structures of inequality. In this lab, we also want to create visibility for the role of people combining experiential knowledge and professional or academic knowledge, who occupy an in-between position between communities and institutions.