Conference Agenda

Can connection and collaboration really co-exist together? Institutions such as academia and the Canadian voluntary sector are increasingly encouraging collaboration. Research has shown that the increase in collaboration is rooted in the larger socio-political-economic project of neoliberalism that promotes “doing more with less,” that is, cost-effective mechanisms for larger productivity and outputs. Similarly, collaboration has become a band-aid on both sides of a macro-dynamic in which institutions leverage collaboration as a cost-effective means to increase productivity while academics and/or medium-scale nonprofit organizations use collaboration to resist institutional pressures and optimize their successes. However, from a humanist perspective, can connection and collaboration really co-exist together in the neoliberal, capitalist, heteronormative context that we live in?

This game changer interrogates the paradox between connection and collaboration in qualitative research. Within academic and community-based inquiry, relationships are often celebrated as ethical and participatory; yet, connection is frequently tethered to the timeline of a collaboration, dissolving once a project ends. What does it mean to build genuine relationships that are not contingent on productivity, deliverables, or shared outputs? This gamechanger explores how relational ethics might be reimagined beyond the logics of collaboration toward a practice of connection that honors temporality, care, and autonomy.

Reimagining relational ethics invites us to explore the constitution of relational ethics. While relational ethics is often conceived as a shared moral framework grounded in reciprocity and mutual understanding, relationality is inherently contingent upon individual values, histories, and affective orientations. As such, relationality cannot be fully mutual, it is singular, partial, and lived differently by each participant. This tension exposes a fundamental paradox: ethics assumes collectivity, while relationality resists it.

Hence, can we ever achieve truly ethical relationality that is mutually understood? In theory, yes—codes of ethics, institutional/community guidelines, and laws create frameworks that assume shared moral ground. Yet, in practice, relational ethics are shaped by individual factors such as one’s relationship to shame. The more deeply shame is buried, the more it constrains one’s capacity to be relational. As a result, relationality remains asymmetrical, often reinforcing a systemic cycle in which collaboration becomes a proxy for connection, a structural bandage covering affective disconnection.

The outcome of this project takes the form of a Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations: a research-creation installation that curates fragments of relational collapse in qualitative inquiry. This living archive gathers traces of projects, correspondences, and emotional residues that mark the afterlife of collaboration: emails never sent, ideas left unfinished, moments of silence that followed care. Each artifact stands as evidence of the paradoxes that shape our scholarly relationships: connection tethered to collaboration, ethics presuming mutuality, and the buried shame that determines our capacity to relate. By materializing what academia routinely conceals: the endings, asymmetries, and quiet failures that structure relational work, the museum invites participants and viewers to reflect on how knowledge is co-constituted through rupture as much as through reciprocity. In doing so, it reframes failure not as absence but as a methodological site of feeling, accountability, and ethical re-imagination.

Session 1: The Paradoxes of Relational Ethics

The session begins with a conceptual presentation of three paradoxes that frame the project: (1) the paradox of connection and collaboration, where relationality is sustained only through productivity; (2) the paradox of ethics and relationality, in which ethics assumes mutuality while relational experience remains asymmetrical; and (3) the paradox of shame and ethical capacity, where unacknowledged shame shapes how and whether we can be relational at all. This opening situates participants within the emotional, ethical, and methodological tensions that give rise to the museum.

Session 2: Building the Museum

Participants are invited to co-create the Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations. Through guided prompts, they contribute fragments of unfinished projects, collapsed relationships, or unspoken endings: emails, reflections, screenshots, sketches, or anonymous notes. These contributions become “artifacts,” displayed digitally or physically, forming an emergent archive of relational rupture. This process transforms personal experience into shared inquiry, allowing participants to witness the systemic conditions that make failure a structural inevitability rather than an individual fault.

Session 3: Completing the Installation

The final session returns to reflection. Together, participants re-enter the museum to interpret what has been assembled, tracing patterns of connection, disconnection, and repair. Discussion focuses on how these paradoxes might reorient qualitative research toward a more honest ethics: one that values endings, asymmetries, and emotional residue as knowledge. The installation remains a living archive, a collective gesture toward accountability and creative closure.