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Paper short abstract

Formed in 2021 amidst COVID-19, the collective ‘studiolab.work on work’ rethinks knowledge production by blending concepts of studio, laboratory and para-site: In and outside our virtual autonomous ‘house’ we experiment with collaborative multimodal practices to create community commons.

Paper long abstract

The collective 'studiolab.work on work' was formed within the atmosphere of COVID19, and against the backdrop of universities shaken by Bologna reforms, third-party funding, and precarious conditions of employment due to the German Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act (WissZeitVG).

For the last five years studiolab virtually brought together people from various academic backgrounds to jointly discuss our experiences with researching work and our own academic working cultures, aiming to collaboratively envision and experimentally create a space for developing and living our reparative vision of academia. Sharing our experiences led to establishing values and rules for the collective that we were forming.

Inspired by the tradition of “Hausprojektkultur” we created our autonomous house - a metaphor to build an alternative community space for knowledge production and to come together as scholars. Our house is a hybrid: part studio (Rabinow et al. 2008, Farías 2025) for being loud and creative, part laboratory (Collier et al. 2007, Bieler et al. 2021) for experimenting and somehow an autonomous para-site (Holmes & Marcus 2007) besides our academic everydays.

The talk discusses our rethinking of knowledge production and co-creating community commons on a broader scale – especially when working together with institutions and people outside of our collective. We will share how we have worked multimodal, used workshops and discussions aimed at sustaining and expanding these collaborative, experimental practices with third parties, engaging with a heterogenous and challenging public, local communities and academic actors in deeper conversations about alternative models for knowledge production and community commons.